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InterText Vol. 8, No. 2 / March-April 1998
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Contents
Getting Rid of January.................Alison Sloane Gaylin
Gidding........................................Michael Sato
The Gray Day....................................D. Richards
Ghettoboy and Dos...............................Craig Boyko
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@intertext.com geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
Submissions Panelists:
Bob Bush, Joe Dudley, Peter Jones, Morten Lauritsen, Rachel
Mathis, Jason Snell
....................................................................
Send correspondence to editors@intertext.com or
intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 8, No. 2. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically every two months. Reproduction of this magazine
is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by
itself or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the
issue remains unchanged. Copyright 1998 Jason Snell. All stories
Copyright 1998 by their respective authors. For more information
about InterText, send a message to info@intertext.com. For
submission guidelines, send a message to guidelines@intertext.com.
....................................................................
Getting Rid of January by Alison Sloane Gaylin
===================================================
....................................................................
Wherein our protagonist discovers the dangers of taking
snapshots, playing Scrabble, and doing a favor for a friend.
....................................................................
Emergency rooms intimidate me, which is a problem because I'm in
them a lot. I'm not sickly, just accident-prone.
Since I still haven't gotten around to finding myself a doctor,
I go to the emergency room whenever I get hurt. My injuries are
frequent and stupid. I tore ligaments in both ankles after I
slipped on some water in an Arby's restroom. I got a minor
concussion from sitting down too vigorously in a high-backed
chair. One time I got a second-degree burn from lentil soup.
When I go into an emergency room, it's like a bad dream. You
know, the kind of dream where you show up for a black-tie party
in a terrycloth robe and try to pass it off as an evening gown.
There are people with heart attacks and bullet wounds and
mangled legs and sharp objects stuck in their eyes. I'm sitting
in the waiting area with a lentil soup burn, thinking, "I really
have to find myself a doctor with an office."
The worst accident of all happened yesterday. The police were
involved. I had to lodge a formal complaint against my best
friend, who happens to be on vacation in the Bahamas. He's going
to hate me.
My best friend is named Walter. Walter has a cat, a white
Persian called January. January hates the world. It hisses and
spits at everyone -- except Walter. It claws. It bites. It often
draws blood. When you go to Walter's apartment, you have to
stand in the doorjamb while he tiptoes around, muttering
"Where's my Jannie? Where's my Janniepoo?" until the cat comes
out of its hiding place and bumps its head into Walter's leg.
Then you're safe, so long as you don't try to approach January,
or walk within one foot of where it's lying.
I made that mistake once. Walter and I were drinking port and
playing Scrabble. And I was winning. I don't know what made me
do it -- maybe it was the thrill of victory, which believe me, I
do not experience often. Maybe it was the port, which I find so
perfectly sweet and cozy that I always wind up having one glass
too many. Whatever the reason, right after I dropped an "e" and
a "t" on the end of "blank" and Walter said "Oh, you bastard,"
because the "t" happened to be on a triple word space and I was
now three points shy of winning the game, after which I planned
to put the theme from "2001" on the stereo and do a victory
dance around Walter, who I knew would try to hit me and/or crawl
under the couch and hide, either of which would have been
equally satisfying for someone like me, who hardly ever wins
anything at all. Anyway, that's when I noticed January, lying on
its back against the wall behind Walter, wiggling its fuzzy
white feet, actually looking _playful_. It was an arresting
sight. It made me go all warm and Christmasy inside. I couldn't
help it. I _had_ to cuddle with that cat.
My speech thick and slurry from port, I cried out, "Oh, look at
the babeeee!"
Before Walter could stop me, I slid up to January, reached out
my hand to rub its stomach --
I had never seen anything like it. The cat actually seemed to
levitate off the floor, its claws aimed at my face like laser
death guns. Then there was the _sound._ To call it a hiss or a
growl wouldn't come close to describing it. It was more like the
detonation of a thermonuclear bomb.
"No, Jannie, no!" Walter shrieked, as the cat affixed itself to
my face with its Satanic claws and scratched and scratched and
bit and scratched.
I could hear Walter yelling "No!" and "Stop!" and "Shit!" under
the continuous deadly whir of the cat. I almost felt as if I was
having an out-of-body experience.
When Walter was finally able to locate his gardener's gloves,
which he kept in his apartment solely for the purpose of
dislodging January from his friends, I was shaking from fear,
but bleeding a lot less than I should have been. Fortunately,
I'd managed to protect my eyes.
"Are you okay, Ellie?" Walter had whispered.
My eyes still closed, I moaned, "It _hates_ me."
So, three days ago when Walter asked me if I could go to his
place and feed January while he went on his Club Med vacation, I
was shocked. "But January hates me," I'd said.
"Actually, she likes you better than most people." That, as
pathetic as it sounds, made me feel privileged. So I agreed to
feed January, and listened carefully to Walter's instructions on
how to do it: "Unlock the bottom lock first, then the middle,
then the upper lock. Upon opening the door, clear your throat
twice. January will notice any departure from this routine --
she's very smart. The gardener's gloves are in the upper right
hand kitchen drawer, conveniently located over the cupboard that
holds the cat food. Put on the gardener's gloves before opening
the cat food cupboard. January takes two even measuring cups of
dry food, mixed with one half cup wet. Two can openers are
located in the cat food cupboard. Use the blue one only in
emergency -- January's accustomed to the red. Stay close to the
cupboards as you pour the food. As January approaches, hold your
breath and stand perfectly still. You can leave after she has
begun eating. The food distracts her."
Walter had finally inhaled. "Got that?"
"Yep," I'd said. Because I had. I'd even taken notes.
"I'm sorry she's so high-maintenance."
"That's okay, Walter."
"I know you'll be able to handle it, Ellie," he'd said with his
black eyebrows pressing into each other. I'd wondered why he
sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Everything went fine the first day. I'd done all the steps
right, down to the throat-clearing and the red can-opener. And
January was so focused on the food and so happy with it that I
almost felt like sticking around Walter's apartment and seeing
maybe if it would watch TV with me. I sort of felt lonely for
Walter, and it would have been nice to sit there on his
zebra-striped couch,watching TV with his beautiful cat like we
were waiting for him to come home from work. But I didn't.
The next day, I showed up at the same time, and unlocked
Walter's door -- bottom, middle, top, just like he told me. I
stood in the doorjamb, and said, "Ahem. Ahem." I thought I heard
a rustling, so I barely entered the kitchen. I got the
gardener's gloves out of the top drawer. As I put them on, I
noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I turned
(pivoted, actually), leaving no room between the cat-food
cupboard and my body, still remembering Walter's rules, as I
squinted to make out the shape on the top of the refrigerator.
(Did I mention that I need to get myself a good optometrist,
too?) It was a picture. Framed. Of Walter and me. Even though it
was blurry, I still knew what picture it was because I took it.
It was Walter and me in front of the Public Library. Each of us
has one arm around a stone lion. I'd set my camera on automatic
timer to take the picture, and it's one of my favorites. I took
it this past summer. My copy is framed and in my bedroom.
I'd never even thought Walter had _kept_ his copy, let alone
framed it and put it on top of his refrigerator. He isn't a
picture-framing sort of person. He isn't fond of clutter. It has
to be a really, really special picture if Walter is going to
frame it.
I wanted to hold it in my hands.
Forgetting momentarily every single one of Walter's rules, I
moved away from the cat-food cupboard and headed for the
refrigerator.
My eyes were glued to the picture. I didn't look down.
That's how I tripped over January.
I don't know how to explain it. One minute you're thrilled to
discover that your best friend thinks so highly of you and your
photographic ability. The next, you feel this furry, twitchy
thing near your ankles and the linoleum's rushing up to hit you
in the face.
"Oh, God, another concussion," I thought. Then I felt the claws
and teeth and angry cat limbs in my hair, and I managed to roll
over on my back, with January still battering me. I saw one claw
graze the corner of my eye. Then I felt it. The sting. The
blood. I was becoming very bloody. I could taste it in my mouth.
I could feel it, oozing out of the side of my nose.
The only lucky thing was that I was wearing the gardening
gloves. I pulled January off my face with both hands and threw
it across the room. There was blood all over Walter's nice
linoleum. All over his nice gardening gloves. I'd probably need
stitches.
Still wearing the gardening gloves, I ran to the emergency room,
which is just a few blocks away from Walter's apartment. For
once, I was the only person in the waiting room. Wouldn't you
know it? The one time I have visible injuries. The nurse took
one look at me and said, "Don't worry about the forms. Just go
back there!" She seemed to respect my wounds.
The nurse showed me to a bed with a curtain around it, and a
young doctor with a curly mustache came in and said, "What
happened?"
"I tripped over a cat," I said.
"Looks like the cat got you back," he said.
I said nothing.
"Cat got your tongue?"
The doctor chuckled. I chuckled, too.
My vision's blurry enough to begin with, so I couldn't tell if
the cat had gotten me in the eye or near the eye. I told the
doctor as much.
"Has the cat had his shots?"
"Yes."
"Well," he said as he cleaned my face with some kind of painful
antiseptic. "Since your injuries involve an animal, you're going
to have to fill out a report. Do you know the cat's name?"
"Yes. It's my friend's cat."
"Well, okay then. I'll call the police."
_The police?_ I thought.
I didn't want Walter to get arrested.
"Please don't arrest Walter," I told the policewoman when she
showed up with the forms for me to fill out.
"We're not going to arrest him," she said. "We're just going to
force him to keep his cat in his apartment for six months. It'll
be quarantined."
"Oh," I'd said. That wasn't so bad. As far as I knew, January
didn't leave Walter's apartment anyway. So I told the
policewoman January's name, and Walter's name. And I described
how I'd tripped over January and eventually pulled it off my
face with the gardener's gloves. The policewoman nodded in a
sympathetic way and said "Thank you," before she left with the
forms.
I did not, the doctor said, experience damage to my cornea. I
did require, and received, three stitches.
As I walked back to my apartment with the cold wind creeping
under my bandages and pinching my wounds, I thought about
Walter, and how he was going to come back from the Bahamas and
there'd be a message from the NYPD on his answering machine,
telling him to keep his cat indoors. I hoped he wouldn't get too
angry.
This morning, I woke up, and took some of the bandages off. The
wounds had almost healed. Except for the head trauma from the
linoleum, I really felt much better. "That antiseptic must have
done the trick," I thought.
As I made myself coffee, I realized that I had to go back to the
scene of the crime today and feed the criminal. I remembered the
blood on the linoleum, my blood, which I would need to clean up
after January had been sufficiently distracted by its food. I
remembered the attack, the claws near my eyes. I remembered how
I'd thrown January off my face, how I'd seen the blood on the
floor, how I'd hurried out Walter's door and headed for the
hospital. Hurried out Walter's door without locking it.
Without _closing_ it.
I think of January, roaming the cold streets of New York, a
criminal on the loose. Prowling. Searching through the dark
alleyways for its next victim. I picture January, creeping up a
fire escape, finding an open window.
Walter's going to hate me.
Alison Sloane Gaylin <amgaylin@aol.com>
-----------------------------------------
Alison Sloane Gaylin is a graduate of Columbia University's
Graduate School of Journalism. She covers entertainment for
several publications and Web sites. She and her husband reside
in upstate New York. They have a dog and a very nice cat.
Gidding by Michael Sato
===========================
....................................................................
Communication requires effort, patience, and honesty--but not
necessarily words.
....................................................................
Jacob came home at four this morning. He didn't hug me; he
nodded at me with his tired eyes. Even at six, his thoughts and
feelings are obscure to me. If I were him I'd be intractably
resentful, but Jacob is careful, independent; he thinks about a
thing until he understands it on his own terms, and then rarely
makes his conclusions known. He mutters them to himself, when
he's alone, in his own private tongue. You'd think it'd be nice
-- having a child who doesn't complain outright. But sometimes
I'd die to know what he's thinking.
Now, at the end of summer, he looks much like his father, a
picture of wild health: suntan, hair long and thick. In a few
months he will look more like me again, nerdy, irregular
haircut, pale. I put him to bed -- his father said he stayed
awake all the way up from Berkeley, a ten-hour drive -- and he
fell asleep at once. His father and I talked for a while. He
knows how to talk to me -- knows how to be useful and honest
without telling me his secrets, his love-words. He asked me if
I'd had any more breakdowns and I said no, which was the truth.
He asked me if I was seeing anyone important; I said yes. He
congratulated me, I think sincerely, though that did not stop
him from complaining. "Are you worried that Jacob will hear?" is
all that he said, because the walls of this house are so thin.
I liked Jacob's father a lot -- more than anyone save perhaps
Max -- but cheated on him more and more regularly as our
relationship progressed. I didn't want to cheat on him. I
_needed_ to. Nonetheless, when he discovered my indiscretions,
of course he could not abide.
When he left I stayed in bed. I hadn't slept much yet, and my
brain was itching with weariness. I let my thoughts trickle away
and was just ready to embark on a dream when, annoyingly, I
became aware of the bell I'd set on my windowsill. Moonlight
hardened into a thin white line on its profile, making the jade
seem like bone. The bell was silent, of course, but I
half-expected to hear sound from it. It kept me awake. Even when
I closed my eyes, my ears stayed open, listening, through the
end of the night and as sunlight slowly covered moonlight.
Even when the room was yellow the bell's spell on me was not
broken until I heard real sounds, morning sounds -- sounds
coming from the kitchen: footsteps, a wooden rattling, some
metal pieces clicking together. Very familiar sounds, but it
took long minutes to recognize them as Jacob fixing his morning
cereal. When he left here, in May, to spend the summer with his
father and grandparents, he still wasn't old enough to get up
and do this by himself. They are quite good to him, I think. His
father's family is a good family, very stable, though Jacob has
never told me what he thinks about all this moving around
between parents. I wish he would, and am terrified to think that
someday he will.
Now Jacob was tapping his spoon against the table and cereal
bowl, experimenting with different tones and rhythms. He's very
musical, and will often try to improvise some instrument out of
whatever objects are at hand. I was pleased to hear that Jacob
preferred making drums of my furniture to talking to himself. I
dislike his private voice so much. I'm a bad mommy -- I have so
far been loath to buy him a proper instrument, for I fear all
the noise that would no doubt follow. I love music, but even one
badly played note makes my bones ache.
I bought a phone with no buzzer, but just a light that flashes.
Sure, I miss a few calls, but the extra silence I get makes that
a small price. If I know someone important is going to call,
then I stay near the phone and look for the call. I had, this
morning, a strong feeling that Max would be calling soon, so
instead of getting up I stayed in bed and did some reading. This
summer I've been reading Hamlet for a night school class I'm
taking in Shakespearean Tragedy. I've been having a hard time
getting past Hamlet; there's something about this story that,
like a vacuum, sucks me in. The rest of the class has already
moved on to Macbeth and King Lear, but reading Hamlet always
leaves me stuck in my own thoughts. I was just moving into one
of those thoughts when my phone started to flash.
"Good morning, Max. How are you doing?"
"Wyn, I feel cold inside," he said.
I've been seeing Max for about three months. When it began I
wasn't looking for any serious romance. I hadn't dated for a
long while, and I thought that I might try again, hoping that an
interval of celibacy had made me stronger, whole enough to see
something through. I wanted to be careful; I exercised what
patience I have, spending plenty of time at the nice-guy hang
outs, bookstores, campgrounds, to find someone who was really
clean. Nice is boring, sure, but I didn't care so much about
that any more. All I wanted was not to fail.
I got a nice one, all right. Max is almost monkish, a holy
loner. He tells me he lost his faith, that he's not religious
anymore, but I think that he still is. "It's easy to be good
when you're unworldly and detached," he once said to me. "I
always wanted to be good, but there came a time when I also
wanted to be part of the game." Max has got an unbelievable
amount of self-confidence, and there's nothing anyone can say to
him that can hurt him. So I was very direct. I told him straight
away that he was a lot more good than he was a part of the game.
I also said there's a big difference between losing your faith
and setting it aside. No one who sets his faith aside is "part
of the game."
Max said that he used to be a pious Episcopalian, stuffed with
all manner of religious dogma, but that he now holds a mere two
beliefs that might be called, broadly speaking, metaphysical.
One of these beliefs, as I understand it, is that, in the wide
arc of time, there are a certain number of crucial moments --
the moment you fall in love, the moment you die -- and that
these special moments have actual auras around them that, like
ripples, spread out not only from the past, but also from the
future. That is, there are a few moments, here and there, that
_echo_. The other belief Max holds regards a certain very old
family heirloom, a little bell made of gold and jade, that he
kept hung from the rear-view mirror of his car. Quite an elegant
ornament, this bell also has the power of feeling the aura of a
crucial moment as it comes to pass. This he believes in honor of
his mother, who gave the bell to him shortly before she died of
cancer.
"Mom kept it with her at the hospital. She said it told her.
That."
"Like magic? The bell rang on its own?"
"Mom said it didn't ring, but that she could hear its sound."
I asked him if he wasn't unwise to have something so valuable
decorating his car, hanging there where everyone could see it.
"People don't steal things from me," he said. Ridiculous, I
know; on the other hand, so far it's been true.
He came to get me at seven last night, wanting to drive me to a
special place he knew, where, he said, the sunset was so
beautiful that it lasts forever. Unfortunately, it was one of
those days when nothing in my closet seemed to fit, and so when
he came I wasn't ready. That he sat in the living room and
waited so patiently made me even more distressed, and I worked
myself into an absolute fit, throwing clothes everywhere.
Everything I put on looked worse than what I was wearing before.
At last I came out and said, "Can we do this another time? I
really have lost the appetite for a beautiful sunset."
"What you've got on is fine," he said, though that before
looking up to see that I was standing there in my underwear,
which didn't match.
"Give me credit for a little shame," I said.
So he got up and walked right past me, into my room, and came
back out with not only a T-shirt and jeans, but also shoes.
"This time, it doesn't matter what _you_ look like," he said.
We missed the sunset. Once we got on the highway he went ninety
all the way, half-seriously invoking the power of the bell to
keep the CHP at a distance. But we got to his place, a rough,
wind-worn promontory overlooking a stretch of coastline, just in
time to see the sun's crown blink off the horizon.
"Okay, I know another place," Max said, already running me back
to the car. We got back on the highway and sped in the direction
of the sun, though fast as we might go, the poor car shaking and
rattling like the flu, we just couldn't catch up to the light.
When we stopped again, at an empty lot next to the sand, the sun
was still nothing more than a sliver of orange on the bay.
"Come on," he said, leaping out of the car. He grabbed my arm
and dragged me down to the sand, saying, "We can catch it, we
can catch it." I went off screaming and squealing but he didn't
mind; he wouldn't let me go. Oh, I never go in the ocean; it's
so cold, and the air was already cold too, and it was windy. We
ran right into a big wave that knocked us over, but he never let
me go, and we choked on water from laughing, the green saltiness
soaked into my mouth and eyes. All the huge, indifferent water
pushed and pulled me, making my feet light on the sand, and we
splashed each other, the water going up like long strings of
diamonds against the great stained-glass sky. Then I pressed
myself against him, for warmth.
"Is this the part that lasts forever?" I said.
He looked around. "I think the part that lasts forever only
happens from the shore," he answered.
Back at the car, we got his throw blanket out of the trunk, then
got in and turned the heater all the way up, and sat together in
the back seat until we were warm, wrapped in his blanket,
listening to the waves crash one upon the other, the whispered
hiss of water on the sand underneath, the soft sounds melting
together into silence. And we were both I think listening in the
same way -- a kind of listening that's like thought, a kind of
listening that keeps going and going so long as it hears nothing
at all.
The way Max makes out, sometimes it seems like he doesn't know
quite what to do, just a big clump of hands making guesses. He'd
told me he wasn't a virgin, though in extremely equivocal terms.
He's continually elusive, when he speaks, on all points
regarding sex, and pry as I might, he seems incapable of
disclosing the simple truth. All I know for sure is that I like
the way that he touches me, much better anyway than so many of
those virtuosos who would wield their parts on me like medical
instruments. Max held my hand during the drive back, rubbed my
fingers, and I was thinking, I was hoping, that this night would
be the night that he'd stay over.
When we got back to my house, I kissed Max good-night and then
hesitated, pretending to be scared to get out of the car. Max
asked what was wrong. I said, "The house is so dark. Looks
creepy. I hate going by myself in a house that's dark. Who knows
who or what might be waiting in there?"
This was a trick of course, to get Max to come in with me. His
line was supposed to have been something like, "I'll just go
check to make sure that everything is okay."
Instead, Max unhooked the jade and gold bell from is rear-view
mirror and put it in my hand. "This will protect you," he said.
No one had ever given me something that way. Never. Giving me
the bell was a big mistake on Max's part. And I was back to the
old way.
"I want you to have it. I feel like giving you something," he
said.
"But this is yours."
"If you have it, then I still have it."
"Max, I don't think we should see each other any more."
Just like that. Again I had failed, and again I had let my
failure take me by surprise. Hope is so miserable. I got out of
the car, and ran into the house.
Standing there in the dark, in my living room, I realized that I
had taken and was still holding onto Max's bell. I also realized
that I really did have a fear, after all. But it wasn't a fear
of the dark or some burglar or rapist waiting for me in the
kitchen. It was a fear of Jacob.
What I was thinking when Max called this morning is that all of
Hamlet's wandering and listening and searching is about Hamlet
trying to find his father and his mother, because his father
isn't there anymore, and his mother isn't who he thought she
was. His life can't go on until he finds them. But he doesn't
know how to find them.
"About what you said last night -- about not seeing me anymore
-- where did that come from?" Max said on the phone. "Did you
mean it?"
"Yes, Max, I meant it. Just accept it, don't make me explain,
it's boring -- trust issues, intimacy issues. Besides, Jacob is
home now, summer's over. There won't be time anymore for us."
"But I don't need time. I don't need anything from you. I only
know that it's lasting inside me. It goes on and on."
This sort of talk continued for a while, and Max was very
clumsy, not because he didn't listen to me, but because he was
so naive about the importance of his own feelings. On the other
hand, one might ask how much sympathy one ought to feel for a
woman who routinely ruins a relationship just because it seems
to be going well. I don't like it that people get hurt; other
people's wounds hurt me more. But that doesn't seem to make much
of a difference.
All I wanted to do now was settle the matter of the bell, which
should have been easy, except that I was so awfully attached to
the thing. The reason I wanted to keep it so badly was, of
course, that the bell meant so much to Max. If he hadn't wanted
it back, I suppose I wouldn't have cared that he'd given it to
me in the first place. It was strangely obvious this morning
that neither of us was in a position to make an outright claim
of ownership; all that could be done, then, was to
hypocritically deny it.
"It wouldn't be fair for me to keep it," I said to him.
"If you feel that way, then I'll stop by and get it," he
answered. The readiness of his concession struck me as odd.
Thick as I am, I didn't see that he was merely seizing an excuse
to come over.
I would have liked to stay in my room and read Hamlet all day.
I'm awful. I had not spoken to my son for three months, and I
only wanted to read.
It seemed Jacob still had some work to do on his cereal
preparation skills after all. A bowl's worth of Fruity Bran was
spread pretty evenly across the whole surface area of the
kitchen, and spilt milk dripped off the edge of the table in
three or four places. On a more promising note, Jacob had
carried his bowl and spoon to the sink, and had run some water
into the bowl so that the little left-over pieces wouldn't
harden onto the ceramic.
Jacob himself was gone; I could hear through the wall that he
was back in his room. I leaned into the wall to better hear the
sounds. This time, happily, there were only the normal sounds of
playing, crashes, airplanes and lasers. Maybe Jacob had, over
the summer, gotten over his problem with language. I allowed
myself to hope it.
It was sometime before Jacob turned three that he began to
employ, while playing by himself, an at-first simple but
increasingly complex series of sounds that only he knew the
meaning for. I only heard the sounds through the walls of his
room; he never used them in my presence. Sometimes when he'd
talk to me, although he's quite articulate, I'd imagine that he
was thinking far too much about what he was saying, and I
wondered if this personal language of his hadn't rendered
English nothing more to him than a system of euphemisms. What
bothered me most though about Jacob's private tongue was that no
matter how hard I tried I couldn't understand it, and it gave me
anxiety attacks to think that rendered through that arcane
muddle of his was Jacob's judgment of me.
I took him to the doctor once. The doctor asked a couple of
questions, then prescribed Ritalin. I refused; I abhor pills of
any kind. They steal you away.
It took a couple of minutes to clean up Jacob's mess, but
instead of stopping with the spilt milk and cereal I just kept
on cleaning. Cleaning is one thing that, as a mother, I do well.
Dust in my house has a shelf life of hours; books and candles
might as well be bolted into their places. I cleaned to the
muffled sounds of Jacob's playing, in my mind following the
course of his games. The kitchen windows got a needed washing;
the floor was duly mopped and waxed. Sometime there the sound of
Jacob's playing ceased, although it wasn't until I was scrubbing
out the sink that I was startled by the silence. Struck at the
same instant with the feeling of being watched, I dropped my
sponge and turned, half-expecting to see Jacob standing in the
threshold.
"Jacob?" I said.
There was a knock at the door (I'd taken out the doorbell; the
ring of it was shrilling), that I mistook at first as being
Jacob's response. I even opened my mouth to answer, and had in
my mind the oddest image of Jacob's voice issued from Max's
face. Then I remembered the bell. Leaving a tub full of suds, I
scuttled to my room to get it, but found that the bell was no
longer on my windowsill, where I'd left it the night before. I
looked on by bed stand, under the bed, on my bookshelf. The
knock repeated. "Just a minute," I yelled, running into the
bathroom, looking again in the kitchen.
"Wyn? Are you all right?" Max had presumed to come in, without
my permission. That wasn't right. I marched out into the living
room, heated, all ready to yell at him, but his hands were full
of flowers -- a big anarchic bouquet of wild lilies and
fireweed, poppies, white roses, all wrapped like an infant in
delicate white paper. It is not civilized to yell at a man
holding flowers. All the same, I was not happy to see them. If a
man gives a woman flowers, it means he's got a plan.
"You gathered them yourself."
"How did you know?"
"Let me find a vase," I said, taking the flowers from his arms.
I had every intention of looking for that vase, if I had to pick
through every room of the house until I found Max's bell. The
shorter his stay, the better.
"Do you need some help?" Max said.
"No. I'll find it."
Max sat down on the couch rather casually, stretching his arms
across the backrest. He said, "I don't really want the bell
back; I want you to keep it. If I have a big moment coming, I
don't want to know it if it doesn't happen here."
Preoccupied with finding the bell, I was only half-listening to
Max, but something about this tugged at my ear; I felt I hadn't
heard it all. I wished he'd say it again.
"Oh yeah, the bell. I'll just get it now," I said.
"You may as well leave it where it is," Max returned.
I thought, Max is telling me that he's ready to sleep with me. I
second-guessed myself. I didn't know what he was saying. I
brought the flowers to the couch and set them down, vase-less,
on the coffee table, and then sat down next to Max, but not too
close.
"Sorry, I didn't hear what you said."
Max looked at me long, as if preparing himself. I could see in
his eyes that he had something important to say, and in my mind
were all sorts of hypothetical revelations. They vanished when
Max began to speak. It was an unusual kind of speech, abstract
and aloof, some words about time, the past and future, a kind of
thinking out loud, but much more deliberate. What was he saying?
It seemed that every next word he spoke foreshadowed the point,
the simple truth, but then left me feeling that the point was
spoken and I had failed to understand, and that in turn made me
bend closer in to each next word. And then I realized that Max
was not speaking at all, but uttering poetry, real poetry,
powerful and large, and I thought, not only is this poetry, but
I've heard this poem before, and I was very confused because
Max's delivery had the faltering tenderness that only newborn
words can have. Max was telling me his love-words. He was
telling me who he was.
"Oh, no, Max," I said, but Max made no sign that he heard me.
"Max, save this. I'm not the one."
But he only continued. And what was he saying? Each succeeding
word seemed to promise the answer, and I was listening so hard
that I lost track of the meaning and began to lose myself in the
sound of the words, the falling of one upon the other of the
grand, impossible images, cutting the cords that attach thoughts
to things -- they made me feel that I was floating, passing in
measures into some great and completely specific silent, empty
space. The words threw their weight against all my voices, all
my needs. I listened hard. And then something changed; as the
poem went on, something sharper and demanding grew into the
words, they turned another face, and they started to scare me. I
saw the words, deployed now in files, gathering around me, their
circle tightening, conniving to trap me forever where I was,
unmoored in the stillness. "We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of our exploring -- "
"Jacob, is that you?" I said, "Are you hiding, Jacob? Are you
listening?"
"Listen to me, Wyn. This might be my only chance."
"I'll just go get your bell," I said.
"But that wasn't the end yet."
"I know a poem too," I said, and launched right into Hamlet's
first soliloquy, which I had no idea I'd memorized. I blurted it
out, like a fidget, full of nerves, needing only to do anything
to halt the tyrannical momentum of Max's poem; it was so strong
in its desire to go on. When the first soliloquy was finished, I
began with the second, and would have gone on to the third and
the fourth, and then started all over again, but my own recital
was shattered by laughter and a flash of movement bursting out
from behind the wall, then disappearing again. It was Jacob. I
knew it. He'd been listening.
"Jacob, it's not polite to hide when there are guests."
Jacob, hid behind the recliner, did not show himself, but
answered with a low, tired moan. My heart sank.
"What's he saying?" Max said. I shrugged. This sound was a sound
of Jacob's private language -- the one he'd never before
produced in the presence even of me. The sound repeated, along
with more giggling.
"He's got this hiding game," I said. "He plays it all the time."
Max nodded, puzzled, and released my hand. He got up and said,
"Well, I'll see if I can't find him." He tip-toed across the
room to where the recliner was, and at the last moment poked his
head over it, saying, "There!" But Jacob had managed to squirm
away, and was already hiding somewhere else. I could hear his
giggling behind the bookcase.
"The game is for me," I said. "You don't have to play."
"No, I want to," Max said. "I'll find him." He just stood there
though, hand on his chin, wondering where to look. It's not that
my living room is so very thickly furnished, but Jacob's got a
gift for evasion.
"Jacob, stop teasing my friend," I said. The answer was
laughter, and then another sound, an airy, hollow note. Coming
from behind the bookcase.
"What's that he's saying?" Max said, now creeping cat-like
across the carpet, to the bookcase. "Is it part of the game? Are
there secret words for things?"
"No, Max. I don't know. The sounds don't mean anything."
Max pounced around the edge of the bookcase, but Jacob, again,
had contrived to slither off at the last moment.
"Surely they mean something," Max said. "Surely he wants me to
understand." Now there was a third sound, this one coming from
behind the television. It was an ugly sound, sucking and
whistling.
"It sounds _like_ something." He turned an ear toward the
television, furrowed his eyebrows. "I can almost get it."
"The sounds don't mean anything! Jesus Max, don't you get it? I
don't want you here. I want you to go -- just go."
Max stuttered and had to throw his arm up against the wall for
balance. He left it there, for a moment, as if needing the
surface to reorient himself. He needed to take a couple of
breaths. He actually needed to look around him to understand
where he was, to understand what I was saying.
"Even if I'd changed my mind, it's too late. It's over with us.
You have to go."
"Let me finish my poem."
"No Max, you can't finish your poem. You can't come back here
any more. Not even to get your bell. I don't even have your bell
anymore, Max. It's broken. I threw it away."
He dabbed a finger against his cheek. "I'm crying."
"Not so big a deal, Max. I cry every day."
He backed slowly toward the door, gazing fearfully at the tear
on his finger. Something else inside him resisted, pushing him
back again toward me. The forces played on him like a
tug-of-war, pulling him this way and that, his feet airless on
the floor, silent and mindless.
"Max, Whenever I get close to someone, whenever I start to trust
someone, or start to have a need for someone, a voice inside me
tells me to get away, and it's a voice that doesn't go away, and
one I can't ignore. With you, Max, it's different. With you that
voice is screaming."
Max said, softly, "Listen to my voice."
"Max, please go."
"Listen to _my_ voice."
"Max, last night I had sex with Jacob's father."
The words sounded on, round and round in the room. And then
there were so many sounds, of a car passing outside, of two
birds, of a neighborhood dog barking, far away. What I had said;
it was the sound of me, of what I am. Things say what they are
with sounds; when I looked at it, there was a sound: the
bookcase, the coffee table. The way I looked at it.
"You did?"
And I thought, I've ruined him. And he wasn't there anymore, but
there was someone in the room, small breathing and footsteps,
and the giggling. But it wasn't giggling -- not Jacob's
giggling. It was higher, and voiceless, a tin can full of stars.
"Jacob, put that down."
He held it above his head, and he shook it. He laughed at the
ring, the ring upon the ring. It was louder than sunlight. I
tried to cover my ears but couldn't lift my hands because Max's
arms were wrapped around them. He'd come back. I buried myself
in him and he put his mouth into my neck, and there was ringing
all around.
"I love you."
"Max, you are a fool."
Jacob leapt onto the coffee table, shook his head and stomped
his feet down on the great bouquet of flowers -- an explosion of
petals. He stretched his arms to the light, closed his little
fingers around the bell and hurled it at the wall.
Michael Sato <michael661@msn.com>
-----------------------------------
Michael Sato has spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay
Area. He finished his M.A. in English in 1996 , and since then
has been working as a teacher and translator in Gunma
Prefecture, Japan. His stories have appeared on the Internet in
Electicai and AfterNoon.
The Gray Day by D. Richards
===============================
....................................................................
If a life is lived with nobody watching, will anyone notice when
it ends?
....................................................................
He woke to the sounds of squeaking bed springs. The red enameled
Mickey (M-I-C-K-E-Y) Mouse alarm clock on his night stand
cheerfully told him it was 6:45 a.m. (why because we like you).
He rolled onto his back and stared at the water stains over his
bed. Squeak squeak squeak came again from his mother's room.
His ears searched the house for any noise to mask the squeaking.
The soft tick tock of the mouse (M-O-U-S-E) clock, forever
guarding the gates of time with a sickly sweet disposition and
oversized black ears. Tick tock, tick tock. The water faucet in
the bathroom down the hall, drip, drip, dripping an unstoppable
tattoo. Never slowing or ceasing no matter how raw he wore his
hand on the rusty metal handles. Tick tock, drip drip, squeak
squeak, pause, squeasqueaksqueak, faster and faster. Almost over
now.
A bird chirped outside the snow-covered window, excited about
the coming sunrise or perhaps lodging a neighborly complaint
about so much racket at such an early hour. Its peaceful dreams
of soft spring soil bursting with winter-fattened earthworms no
doubt disturbed by the ever increasing cacophony from the next
room.
Moan, moan. Groan, squeak, oh yeah... oh yeah. Shh... pant
pant... not so loud (his mother). Ugh ugh ugh, wheeze.
Mr. Potter. The boy recognized his wheezing moans, always
transparent through the plywood walls of their apartment.
The bird chirped again and lit off in search of a quieter spot
to sing the songs that would attract a mate of his own.
Tick tock, drip drip, squeak squeak. Moan, groan... oh, god, oh
god, oh yeah. The noises collided as the pace reached maddening
new heights. The boy closed his hands over his ears so hard they
hurt, screaming noiselessly as the train of sound derailed in a
final burst of Oh guhhh, yeah, oh...yeah...uh...uh..uh..mmmmmmm.
Tick tock. Drip drip. (See ya real soon!)
The boy balanced precariously on a three-legged stool,
stretching to the tips of his toes, straining to grasp the
bottom edge of the Count Chocula box. Mr. Potter came into the
kitchen barefoot on the cool tile floor. Holding the box tight
to his chest, the boy climbed down from the stool and sat
cross-legged on the floor. He set to shoving handfuls of the
count of chocolate into his mouth from the wax paper packet
inside. While he ate his breakfast he watched Mr. Potter rummage
through the stacks of coupons and unpaid bills on the top of the
refrigerator. His blue shirt bore the county sheriff's patch on
the shoulder. It was unbuttoned, revealing a tremendous belly so
thickly matted with black hair that the flesh underneath was
barely visible. Mr. Potter wheezed and coughed as he searched.
Abandoning the refrigerator, he turned and noticed the boy
staring up at him.
"Hey boy, got a cigarette?" He chuckled at his own joke.
The boy watched him for a moment longer, methodically chewing
his cereal. The hair covering his belly had spread to every bit
of exposed flesh except for the top of his head, which gleamed
brightly under the bare fluorescent bulb.
"Squeak squeak squeak," the boy replied in a monotone, searching
the box for another handful of chocolate goodness.
Mr. Potter looked blank for a moment. Then slowly his face began
to swell and turn a harsh red. "Why you little..." he wheezed.
"Oh god, oh yeah," the boy said blandly, never looking away.
Mr. Potter began to shake. Slowly he took large breaths and let
out tense sighs. After a moment he forced an attempt at a smile
and bent down to ruffle the boy's hair.
"Our little secret, right pal?" His sweet tones belied the
murder in his eyes.
The Potters lived in the apartment below the boy and his mother.
One week a month, when Mrs. Potter drew the graveyard shift at
the silicon chip factory outside of town, Mr. Potter would come
visit with his mother at night. He didn't always wake up there,
in case Mrs. Potter came home early, but he and his mother had
been up late drinking last night. The boy had heard them come in
at 2:15, Mickey time.
Sometimes Mrs. Potter would grab the boy in the hallway and ask
him in a harsh whisper if he ever "saw her old man nosin' around
his house." She'd promise him candy if he told her what he knew,
but since she never had any to actually offer him, the boy told
her the same thing he told Mr. Potter about "their little
secret."
"Squeak squeak squeak," he said, and returned to his cereal.
His mother was snoring by the time the boy was getting his coat
on for school. Stopping by the refrigerator, he filled his
pockets with raw hot dogs and a half a block of Velveeta.
On the first floor of the apartment building he waited for the
school bus to come. The day was obscured by the frost on the
glass doors, letting only a dull gray light pass through. He
whispered softly as he waited, "Here kitty kitty, here kitty
kitty." He laid the hot dogs and cheese on the carpet by the
stairs. "Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty."
He'd last seen the cat outside the front doors of the building.
His mother had started putting it outside when Mr. Potter came
over for his secret visits. The cat had tucked itself as far
back as it could under the thin evergreen bushes on either side
of the entryway; there was a vent that let out hot air if anyone
in the apartment ran the quarter dryer in the basement. The boy
had called to the cat again and again but with no reaction. He
crawled under the bush, calling softly to it all the while. The
snow soaked his coat, making him shiver. He called, "here kitty
kitty, here kitty kitty," crawling on his belly closer and
closer. Finally he was unable to go any further under the bush
and had to use a stick to prod the cat into motion. It felt
firm, frozen firm. He knew right away that it was dead.
When he'd returned that day from school he had looked again and
seen that it was gone. He wasn't sure if he believed it or not,
but he'd heard somewhere that cats have nine lives, so he'd
taken up the habit of leaving it treats, just in case he was
wrong.
After he felt he'd given the cat enough time to return to him he
began to draw tiny roadways on the frosted glass of the doors.
Drawing was his favorite thing to do, especially tiny mazes and
highways. As he drew he imagined the highways packed with tiny
cars filled with tiny families. He drew the roads they went down
in tighter and tighter circles. He pictured the father banging
on the steering wheel of the station wagon and cursing at the
world for not providing him with an exit. When he'd drawn so
much that the frost melted to reveal the snow-covered streets
outside he'd breathe on the window until he could begin anew.
As he waited for his bus he drew and softly sang to himself, "Oh
god, oh god, oh yeah, oh god."
On the bus he found his seat. It was always vacant. Reserved
just for him. He tried most of the time not to notice but some
days he was aware that the other children would switch seats to
sit by their new best friends, or maybe to get away from their
old ones.
Today he played with the frost on the window, continuing his
master plan for the never-ending highway. Lost in his work, he'd
try to ignore the spit wads that struck his head and face, shot
whenever the bus driver wasn't watching. He worked diligently on
his highways, until the fog disappeared and revealed the flat
gray outside world. He'd lean in close and breathe a new window
canvas to life, all the while pretending not to notice the soft
giggles coming from the surrounding seats.
In the classroom he sat in the uncomfortable wooden desk seat
he'd been assigned in the back corner of the classroom. He used
a yellow number two pencil to draw his tiny highways on a
weathered Big Chief tablet. Lost in his tiny world of
automobiles and highways and very unhappy fathers always looking
for an exit, he sometimes thought he could hear the teacher
calling his name. The other children would laugh and laugh until
they were hushed. He just bent over closer to the paper. If he
squinted hard enough he could almost see them moving, hear them
screaming, "Daddy, are we there yet?"
At lunchtime he sat alone, eating everything on his plate
without tasting or caring what it was. Unless it was chili day.
On chili day they gave him a cinnamon roll.
He would carefully set his plate aside and unfold his thin white
paper napkin and set it in the center of the yellow linoleum
topped table. Daintily, he'd place his cinnamon roll on the
napkin and begin the process of unrolling it. Many times in the
process it would threaten to break at one of the thinner turns
of the inward spiral. When the occasional inevitable break did
occur he would stop and with great care mash the torn bites of
the moist dough back together until they were once again whole.
When he'd finally reach the center he'd turn the entire length
of the pastry on its side and put both ends into his mouth. He'd
chew the entire length of the roll to its end, never swallowing
until he'd managed to put the whole thing into his mouth.
"Boy," the teacher snapped, snatching the pencil from his hand
and breaking him abruptly out of his fog. "What are you
wearing?"
He stared down at his highways, perfect circles, no beginning,
no end, wishing he could swallow her whole.
The other children giggled, of course.
Leaning closer so the others might not hear she asked again.
"Boy, are those pajamas?"
Go away, go away, go away, he thought.
The class laughed harder. "Shut up," she told them. "All of you
just shut up!" They were instantly quiet. Even he could feel how
much she meant it.
"Boy," she started, and then stopped, letting her thoughts fade
away.
Go away, go away, go away. She sighed, shaking her head.
He never looked up, never moved.
Gently she laid his pencil down on the almost black paper in
front of him. He quickly scooped it up, trying hard to
re-establish the block he had on the world.
"You poor thing," she whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder.
"You poor, poor thing."
On the bus ride home he sat with his hands clenched tightly in
his lap. He felt as if he were trapped on one of his highways,
spiraling tighter and tighter into himself.
He thought about her, the teacher, putting her hand on him.
Every time he felt it in his memories the lump in his throat
grew larger, until it seemed as if he were choking. Opening his
mouth to gasp for air, the tears started to come. A spit wad
stung his cheek, followed by a barrage of them. The bus driver
glanced into his overhead mirror, the giggles faded and the
straw weapons disappeared. He ignored them, straining to see
even a hint of color in the view through the window. There was
none. Just gray.
Just another gray day.
The bus lurched to a stop. Lifting his books from the space that
had always been empty in his seat he moved for the doors. "You
poor thing," one of the girls from his class mocked as he
passed. Their whispers and laughter blurred into a dull noise at
the back of his mind. The frayed wet ends of his pajamas swished
against the rubber running mat as he walked. The driver held
open the doors, letting in the gray, letting him out.
The gray day swallowed him. The tears ran down his cheeks and
froze on his coat collar.
Squeak squeak, Mr. Potter, squeak squeak, mother. Tick tock drip
drop squeak squeak. Oh god oh god goes the chugga chugga choo
choo train come to drive little boys insane. Squeak squeak says
the tiny family waiting in the wings to come and kidnap the boy
for a ride on the no-exit highway.
Following the color green, the boy shed his coat and pajamas and
laid his books aside. "Here kitty kitty," he cried softly, as he
lay down naked in the snow.
"Here kitty kitty, here kitty kitty." The tears turning to ice,
the ice filling his soul, the soul swallowed as whole as a
cinnamon roll by the gray.
They say the little boy just gave up.
D. Richards <swingb@ix.netcom.com>
------------------------------------
Hails from Lawrence, Kansas. "The Gray Day" was inspired by a
story he read as a child about strange deaths and mysterious
disappearances. He is currently at work on a full-length novel.
Ghettoboy and Dos by Craig Boyko
====================================
....................................................................
A boy and a girl. Past, present, or future -- some kinds of
stories are eternal.
....................................................................
1.
----
There is a boy and there is a girl. Somewhere not far away (we
can be sure) there is a boy and a boy, and elsewhere in the City
tonight there is, without a doubt, a group of girls and not a
single boy.
But tonight, here and now, it is about _this_ boy (eyeing this
girl and goddamn what's happening to his heart throbbing like
that and it's like his lungs are rattling) and it is about
_this_ girl (she saw him when she came in and there was
definitely something small but promising in his nonchalance and
she kind of likes the glisten of the hairs on his chin but come
on now, this isn't like her at all, so play it sparkles, girl).
The boy licks his lips and plays cool. Girl buys cigarettes and
smiles stoically (glimmer of something mutual in the shudder of
her shoulder, he thinks) at the countertop. Girl turns away from
him as she turns and falls through the crowds of
confection-seekers. She washes summer twilight sighs across her
neck-skin, painting bars of blue and smoke on perfect paleness;
then the door swings and new bodies take her place.
Boy relinquishes his spot in line, gives up his chance at an
early bus, loses all hope for getting back in time to save face
with his employer, all possibility of securing a weekly score.
But hope breeds necessity, and he doesn't need anything, not
now, nothing but his feet on that sidewalk, and now, and how.
She knows he's there before he says anything, before she can
even really know he's there, so maybe it's half anticipation and
half desire for it to be so. So when he really does say, "Hey,
so how much?" and she's fumbling with her cigarette and lighter
and pack and coughing little don't-inhale puffs because she only
picked up the habit fourteen days ago, and when he taps her on
the shoulder because he's not sure she heard even though she's
the only one nearby, well, she turns and sees that it's him, and
she smiles inside, and it mingles with the smoke she just
swallowed, and it burns, but burns _nice_. Maybe like his face
was something she should be smiling at, like it all fit just
perfect, because hadn't she sensed him back there, checking her
out?
"Too smooth," she says, and forgets, and inhales, and coughs.
He thinks it might be too early here to make fun of her coughing
like that, like a novice, and only light-brand cigarettes, but
he falters himself, and his stomach feels weird tonight, and so
he says: "You don't smoke much, huh?" and it feels so dumb once
it slips past his tongue and hangs on the warmth of the air.
"Really too," she says, and keeps walking, eyes sliding away
from him onto her path of determination.
"Huh, what?"
"You want to know how much?"
"Yeah," he says, maybe feeling defiant here.
"You say 'how much' and I say 'too smooth.' Really too."
She stops. They stop. She looks at him. Her cigarette fingers
flutter to her lips. "Thing is," she says, "I don't turn."
His eyebrows crease. He means to say "fuck you," he's sure (that
feels about right), but that something weird in his stomach is
spreading, malignant, into his throat, and instead, "Hey, I'm
sorry," are the words that are issued.
Her eyelids lower a notch; her cigarette hand jitters. She sucks
in smoke slowly, almost but not quite faking it, and shrugs.
Their eyes:
Lock-catch-sputter-speak-connect.
She can't explain this feeling but knows it for what it might
be, if he doesn't turn out to be a complete asshole. And he's
just looking, looking, watching (but why?) the nightsky pink of
her lips wrap around the white-pink of cancer stick, fingers
pale and thin and quivering all but imperceptibly.
Her neck is very smooth and he wants her to speak.
She says, " 'Least not for cash," smiling.
His heart is kicking his rib cage, thumping weird, non-rhythmic
patterns. Her smile, though, wrests one from him, and he says,
"Now that's just _not_ good business sense."
She turns and walks again, her gaze devoted to the cracks of the
sidewalk directly before her. "Tell you what," she says, her
voice soft and almost lost in the traffic-laden night air. "You
charge and I'll charge and we'll call it even."
It almost happens anyway, this very night, which was what he was
wanting all along, and now she is definitely on that same
wavelength, isn't she? It was what he is wanting, but now that
it's in sight, but free, it's somewhat disconcerting to him.
She leads him through fogged crowded street mazes beneath and
between and shadowed by soot-stained neon glow-towers of the sky
and day-business -- which is what they call it where she comes
from, "day-business" -- that which you hear about but maybe only
see expensive-sports-car vestiges of, that which makes the city
sprawl like it does, and beat, and respire, and spin and weave
and yearn to the clouds.
She leads him to a small cavernous grove of aluminum and soft
light, dug into the street, with shops and booths lining the
peripheries, and stars twinkling -- not really visible, but you
know they're up there because of the sweet oil-fresh smell of
the night mixed with ozone and barbecue. He buys from a beer
booth, she from a canned cola dispenser with all its stickers
ripped off. They find two adjacent seats wedged between a couple
on the one side and a white-knuckled, nervous-looking teenager
on the other. He cracks the cap on his Bathing Beauty Beer and
eyes the kid next to them, maybe five years his junior, with a
hairstyle he might have considered last month but might have
decided to be too blatantly Westside, and he was all Midtown,
but never proud of it. The kid leaves after only the most
perfunctory pretense of non-disgust.
They say little as they sip at their drinks, his eyes on her
face as she looks beyond him, somewhere out into the ebullient
crowd as she feigns cogitation, then her eyes swing back and
catch his and they both retreat, but she returns to his face
before he does, and now he pretends to stare beyond her,
concentrating on something invisible within his own head, and
the sequence repeats, reversed.
He thinks about speaking to her, not the words so much as the
actual physical operation of parting his lips and eliciting
noise from down there where the beer goes. He decides against
saying anything, for fear of contaminating the moment. Somehow
creating guttural sound seems beneath them both right now.
Instead, they play eyeball hockey.
He feels sick.
The time click-clicks past three in the a.m. and still the crowd
does not thin, so she begins to think it's time to move on. He
hasn't tried anything and he hasn't complained and the way he
looks at her then quick-quick looks away...
"Wanna go for a walk?" she asks and he nods, swallowing suds
from a third or fourth beer, the one exact brand that she can't
stand to smell, let alone ingest.
They stand and she grabs his hand and _Oh God_ he thinks and she
leads him through the streets of the sweet desperate night.
"My name is Ghettoboy," he proffers, yet he's not sure why,
because she has released his hand long ago. She smiles at him,
though, in silent thanks, and maybe that's why.
"Hi," she says, too quiet to be heard over the slap-slap of her
shoes and the clap-clap of his boots on the concrete, but he can
read her lips by the flickering orange neon of sky-high
back-alley penthouse dance club and so he smiles and whispers
_Hi_ to the back of her neck once she turns around again.
Out of narrow and into wide open. Street lights augmented by
backlit streetside advertisements reaching to the sky, televised
or static, shifting, smiles and breasts, white teeth, warm
beaches and blue skies, products, bottles, pictures of fried
chicken and pizza, advertisements with hidden advertisements
within, Pepsi and Slazenger condoms, McDonald's and United World
Adult Video. They walk, as she motions for him to follow, down
the wide sidewalks lining the wide streets, busy as ever at this
hour, traffic humming, rubber squeaks and brakes howling and
motors coughing. They peel through the throng, always together,
sometimes side by side, usually he a step or two behind, not
knowing their destination if there is one.
Stupid, because it's loud here, but he speaks anyway: "Are we
getting lopers?" She doesn't hear him, walking faster now,
hopping out of the way of some large Indian-American pushing a
baby stroller stacked with frayed paperbacks.
Touching her shoulder and she slows, the line of her lips
neutral and curious. "Are we going somewhere to get drugs?" he
asks.
"What? Why?" The edges of her mouth twist into an almost-frown.
"I just thought back there, maybe, you were waiting for someone.
All that time."
"What do you mean?"
"Like a dealer," he says, feeling maybe almost stupid now,
because of her confusion and the way she's looking at him. "All
that time we were there. I thought you were waiting for
someone."
She shrugs. "No. I wasn't." She continues to walk. He follows
her.
"Sorry," he says, but she doesn't hear, or pretends not to, but
then again, he's not really sure he actually spoke the word,
instead of just thinking it, and he doesn't want to take the
risk of saying it twice, so he just follows her, through the
night getting cold and the crowd blowing smoke into their faces.
They pass through a door that she has to swipe her palm through
a glass-encrusted reader to open, and climb a steep, folding
flight of stairs where they have to step over broken bottles and
syringes and around a sleeping cat, and shuffle quietly at her
cue through a dim hallway past crooked sleeping doors. The smell
is of pasta and soil and heroin residue and old wood that gets
wet and then dries again.
She uses a thick metal key on the door at the very end of the
hall. In the middle of the door hangs a taped-up sign which
reads "Radioactive Materials: Hazardous Chemicals: Clearance
Level Two Required" and scribbled beneath these blocky words
which look like blow-ups of the typeface you get on paper
receipts at old shopping centers are the words "Stay the fuck
out!" Below that, printed smaller and with a different color pen
is the word "please."
The door swings inward and she is inside, washed away by
darkness, and he follows before he can think too much about it.
The door slams behind him and then a sweaty pinkish light
flashes awake before his mind can run away into the darkness
thinking about her sweet face smiling as her thin pale fingers
drive a blade into his gut.
"Something to drink?" she asks, (just like they'd say in the
movies, he thinks) stepping out of her shoes like they could
have fallen off at any moment had she not willed them to stay
on, and he shrugs half-way out of his jacket and then decides
against that just yet, and says "How about a Coke?"
He sees her profile smile as she walks across the small room
toward the fridge, which rests two feet away from her crumpled
bed, which sits two feet away from her thirteen-inch television,
which sits on a cut-in-half coffee-type table, which blocks part
of the entrance to her bathroom. "Anything with that? Vodka or
rum? Think that's all I got."
He doesn't really think she's much older than fifteen and it
seems strange to him, these words belonging to her, but
rightfully to a woman ten years her senior. And this place, with
its one bed and separate bathroom and clean carpet and
full-sized oven: is this all hers?
"Rum, then, with the Coke, and some ice."
"No ice."
"Okay."
She pulls bottles from the fridge and glasses from the sink,
kicks the fridge door shut, pulls caps off the bottles and
starts pouring like a pro. He watches her. She closes her eyes
and rubs the back of her neck with one hand while she pours his
drink.
"And for me," she says, "the same, but with more rum than Coke,
and shaken-not-stirred, and a-toast-to-your-children."
How many have I had? he wonders. She sits down next to the muted
television once again, the screen at an angle and flashing
images off her resilient skin (he watches as fingers and white
teeth float across her shoulders in a long, crawling zoom-in),
and he's sure that she's matched him one-for-one; in fact, she's
just poured herself another, so why is it that he's having
difficulty focussing and she seems perfectly all right?
"How old are you?" he asks, regretting the question for only a
moment before he is washed over by total equanimity; acceptance
accompanied by alcohol; the knowledge that anything he might say
now is not really, entirely, his fault.
"Why does it matter?" she returns, smiling almost mischievously.
He wishes vaguely and fleetingly he had a better foothold with
which to comprehend that smile. He lets it pass and concentrates
on her soft features.
"I think it matters."
"No. It doesn't. I'm any age you want me to be. And don't take
that in the wrong way, it's not like an offer, or a cheap
turn-on line, Jesus. I only mean that if I don't tell you, you
won't get any misconceptions and eventually, ultimately, it will
stop mattering. I'll become that age you're most comfortable
with. And what is age, besides a count of how many years we've
been alive, anyway? Who cares? It doesn't stand for anything.
Not when the first sixteen don't really count, anyway."
So she's seventeen, he thinks. At least.
He turns down another drink.
She smiles. Knowingly?
"So how about this place?" he asks, on some kind of a stupid
roll, out of it, unable to stop, keep bugging her, he thinks,
get information out of her, but maybe he's just making
conversation.
"What about it?" She watches him closely. He's acting maybe a
little obnoxious, but she's seen worse drunks, and he's not that
bad off, not yet, not really, but is that a good thing or a bad
thing?
"Is it yours?"
She sips at her glass and her eyes fall gracefully to the
carpet, then linger there, and she runs the index finger of her
glass-holding hand along the soft, slow arc of her eyebrow as
she swallows the liquid. "It's my mom's," she says eventually.
"You both -- you both live here?"
Which implies, she thinks, that he thinks it's small. Too small
for them both, and he'd be right.
"She's not around much these days," she says carefully. "She has
a job."
His eyes almost light up, and he straightens himself in the
chair. "You mean like a -- "
"No. Don't ask. Like a job."
"Oh."
His posture falls back and the pink glow of the curve of the rim
of his glass momentarily mesmerizes him, and when he looks back
at her she's staring deep into the television screen.
He almost falls forward off his chair so she leads him to the
couch. He has lost his jacket somewhere, somehow, and he likes
the warmth of her palm on his shoulder as she says "I gave you
too much," and he laughs, replying, "I let you give me too
much."
She lets him fall onto the couch. He stares, amazed, as she
begins to untie his shoes, but then realizes it's just because
she doesn't want her couch dirtied.
"After a certain point, though, it becomes my responsibility."
"I shouldn't be your responsibility," he says. Something, he
knows, is wrong. Somehow he has lost some control, some
remainder of upper-hand, but maybe it doesn't matter, and maybe
where he is right now is better.
"You have to be," she says. "You're in my home."
He feels guilty. "I'm sorry."
"No," she smiles up at him. "Don't be."
She tosses his shoes across the room and they collide plangently
with the front door. She moves around the couch in the breadth
of a blink, and bends down, touches something out of his
eyesight, and lowers the back of the couch in one fluid,
mechanic motion. She straightens the cushions and falls down
next to him, in control of gravity and time and space.
The TV turns itself off.
Almost asleep and her fingers brush his shoulder and he does the
wrong thing and rolls over to face her. Leans into her.
"No," she says, and touches his chin with her thumb. "It's not a
good time."
"No, it's not," he says, apologetic, and closes his eyes.
She looks so serene, he thinks, as his eyes peel awake, shocked
by the thick orange sun of the late-late morning as it soaks in
past thin curtains and rusty insect-grate and flights of
fire-escape skeletons. She is fully clothed and her hair is
flared about her head and her face tilted away from him and for
the longest time, maybe until he falls asleep again, he cannot
remember what happened last night. But he decides it doesn't
matter, and just stares at the soft hazy opalescence of her neck
and shoulders.
There is something intrinsically beautiful about sleep, and it
awes him that he has never noticed it before.
When she awakens it's just as he's slipping back under once
again and so he asks her, his voice thick with morning
throat-paste, what her name is. She tilts her head a little
toward him and then smiles to the ceiling and then tells him,
after touching his foot under the sheets with her own, that it
doesn't matter, either. Her movements as she delicately extracts
herself from the cushions of the couch reverberate through his
body, soporific and subtle, and he lets himself close his eyes
once again, perfectly content to be here, now, no questions
asked.
2.
----
She looks at him for long, long minutes, as she has known his
newly discovered appreciation of slumber for quite some time,
and knows as well how it can be deceiving, how she can see him
here, like this, as whoever she wants him to be, and it's
frightening how much she's beginning to like him, and he's
likely going to wake up with a hangover and who knows what he'll
be like then, but everything here is too perfect right now in
its silence and calm for her to want to detract from that in any
way, so she allows these thoughts to fade, and she just watches
him sleep.
She gets up after some time and drinks some orange juice from
the fridge. She spits the pulp into the sink. She changes her
shirt. She looks at him again and curses herself. She leaves a
note on the counter which reads:
went to buy groceries
I should be back in 30 minutes
its 1:30 now
wait for me? we can go get
breckfast if you want
I had a good time last night
hope your here when I get back
Dos
She wants to erase the last couple of lines before her name, and
maybe her name along with it, but she has written with pen, and
doesn't want to go back and do it all over again, and maybe if
she hurries she can be back before he wakes up anyway.
Hopefully he won't steal anything. Maybe the letter will help.
He isn't there when she gets back. She panics, looks around,
slams the door, thinking -- but the toilet flushes and she sighs
and cusses to herself, drops the Safeway bags on the kitchen
counter and steps out of her shoes. Stares at the letter she
left but then as she hears him fiddling with the bathroom door
she crumples it and tosses it down the disposal, thinking maybe
he didn't see it.
He comes out blinking and zipping his fly, and she thinks that
he looks tired and messy and she frowns inside, all the while
knowing that it is just his bad moment, his transition from
asleep to awake, and everyone has it -- but maybe this is as bad
as it gets.
He blinks and nods and says, "Oh. I thought you had gone." Rubs
his eyes with fisted fingers and then picks at the eye-glue with
his pinkies.
"I went to," she motions behind her with her fingers, and turns
around and looks at the dirty dishes in the sink, "you know, get
some groceries. Some food and," she runs her hand through her
hair and frowns slightly and looks at his socked feet,
"supplies."
"That's sparkles. I got this, this deal in my apartment block, I
live with a couple other guys, and the place comes with food, so
they restock the place for you every week. If you remember, you
know, to put in your order. Before Wednesday."
"Yeah?" she says. He needs to shave, she thinks. She needs to
shave, too.
"Yeah. Yeah, it's not bad. It's too bad the place is a complete
shithole otherwise."
She laughs. He smiles. "Do you want to go out and get some
breakfast with me?" she asks then.
He looks down at the carpet and pushes at the curve of his back
like maybe he slept on it wrong. He looks up at her finally and
tries to keep his eyes with hers but she has to look away. "I
don't know. I should probably be going."
"No, yeah, that's okay," she says quickly.
He starts to say something. Picks his way into his shoes
instead.
Plucks his jacket and looks at her but she's putting away
groceries, seemingly engrossed. He goes to the door. She almost
looks up. Moves more slowly.
"Hey, listen," he says, "thanks for the..."
She does look up. Smiles. Tilts her head. Looks down. At her
hands. "Don't mention it," she says.
He leaves.
She walks to the door and locks it. Leans her back into it and
closes her eyes.
He walks into the street, back the way they came (he thinks),
becomes disoriented anyway, stands in the middle of the
sidewalk, looking for landmarks, shielding his eyes from the
blow-up dirty heat of the sun; late midday crowds curve around
him on their collectively individual ways; to work, to buy, to
sell, to home.
She turns on the TV and watches it from the kitchen, at an angle
where all the lines merge and all the colors are condensed and
even the words spoken sound dull, far-away, distorted, but maybe
that's not the television so much as the thoughts pushing
through her head.
He walks a couple of blocks, stands at the corner near a
bus-stop, and watches stolidly as the #11 (which by all means
should be his to catch) idles up to the curb, pauses, opens its
doors, swallows its fares, and then slides away in an eruption
of stale eddies of oxygen.
She answers the door half an hour later without even thinking,
at least not till after the fact (well, the chain-lock is in
place, but a lot of good that's going to do against an armed
intruder), but it's him, and she's maybe stunned, but also
happy, and she wants to swing the door open and let him in, but
she just stands there with her face at the crack and blinks at
him. Maybe he forgot something.
He smiles and clears his throat. "Hi."
"Hi."
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Places a fist
softly into the palm of his other hand. "I forgot that I'll need
your phone number."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Right," she says, as if waking up again, pulling at the door,
pulling at the chain lock, letting him in, walking
quickly-no-naturally into the kitchen and grabbing
pen-paper-pencil-paper, jotting numbers and her name, yes, both,
so he'll know who to ask for, turning around, surprised because
he has moved up right behind her, and she hands him the yellow
piece of paper and he takes it.
She smiles. "Okay."
"Thanks," he says. "I'll call."
"Okay."
He backs up and slips through the door.
"Bye," she says.
There.
None of his clocks have arms, but they stretch. Anyway. The
electric blip-blip-blip of the eyebulbs of the alarm clock blink
knowingly at him. Beyond the city-sky grease of his window the
sun blinks and wavers and drowns in steel coolness; the early
evening whispers through the rafters of the clouds.
Tripping, sucking at his thumbnails, the world is green.
She vacuums, listens to one of her mother's shitty '80s discs,
pauses, glances at the tel, then the phone, then out the window
(where she can see brick and smoke and soft blue effulgence from
the window of the cash dentist downstairs) and she pauses, and
pauses, and sits down on the couch, and wipes her forehead.
He spreads himself out into the junk of the evening, leaking
through the pathways of the music and the birth of light and
noise and whispers of business and tough night-slammers packing
heat/metal and flipping daunting fingers at each other across
the street-ways saturated with rusty traffic. He clicks his
tongue at the back of his throat, smiles serenely at scar-tissue
faces poking out of the smog, runs his fingers across different
patches on his jacket and various veins on his face and down the
line of his jaw, indicative of his all-too copesetic nature, his
intrinsic all-rightness, no problems here, he is cool, he's
down, leave him alone, search elsewhere 'cause this cat's
ace-of-spades.
Flashes card and he slides inside the warm concrete minimalist
retro-proactive designer womb of the burrito libido --
absolutely no capital letters, it's part of the theme, it's the
ineffably irreducible thing of the place, and besides, they're
just not sparkles. The libido is big and plain, the operators
capitalizing on the oneness of the place, the earthiness of a
pure solid block of cement, the object that it is, replaceable,
simple, non-threatening.
A vast box of cement, abandoned industrial-something, nothing
but floor and wall and speakers attached haphazardly to the gray
sky and glued-on drink dispensers near the back wall, next to
the paper-thin toilet booths. It's too nothing to be anything,
and maybe that's why it draws the crowds, as they attach
themselves to the walls; they project their own inherent
emptiness onto the blankness, and the place becomes themselves,
and they languish, and they love it. He picks through the
bodies, hating the place for its ostentatious anomie, its
ass-backwardness, because how is he ever going to find Nine Ways
amid this disarray; misanthropy and bile rising like a pollution
cloud within him, but maybe it's just the drugs, the comedown.
Endless looping in lethargic circles, skin and muscle and
leather and cleavage excreting sweat onto him and making his
eyes sting. This place wouldn't be so bad, he thinks, if he
could get some lopers inside him and wash away the throbbing
behind his eyeballs.
He gets into the three-deep sweet vodka line, picks at the edge
of his nose with his thumb, spins around slowly watching the
faces and the illuminated haircuts, then buys a forty-percent
eighty-proof lime-Coke vodka fixer-mix. The machine pours the
bright green fluid into a floral-patterned paper cup after it
swallows his tattered fiver. He extracts himself from the crush
of the drink lines and spin-slides into the hardcore dance
nucleus. Sips at cool fruit-flavored effervescence and wipes the
glow from his chapped lips with the back of his hand; makes
eye-contact with the schoolgirls and nods solemnly at their
boyfriends; scans the ranks of sweat and skin for Nine.
Rubs a towel across her head, fumbles with the door, slips
across the linoleum and picks up the phone. Her mother.
"Where's Roger?"
"I don't know, Mom. What do you want?"
"Roger?"
"No, it's Dos. What do you want?"
"When I get my hands on that kid, when I get enough money to get
around to... what time is it?"
"It's late."
"Dos?"
"What?"
"Okay, Roger's here."
"Okay, Mom."
"Are you doing your homework?"
"Yeah."
"You better be staying away from that club. And that _boy_."
"Right."
"Going to get... he won't let me leave, Dos."
She closes her eyes.
"No, Mom?"
"No. But he... he doesn't, you know... he pays me well."
"I know, Mom." He's a wonderful human being.
"I'm coming home tomorrow to pick up some of my clothes."
"Great."
"Why don't you ever clean up around that fucking place?"
"Why don't you ever call when you're fucking sober?"
"Don't you ever fucking -- "
"Bye." She hangs the phone back on the wall.
Back in the bathroom, she brushes her hair.
Sits on the toilet; looks at her hands. The phone rings. And
rings.
She notices that he left one of his socks behind.
Dials the number from the wrinkled corner of paper that he's
thumbed out of his wallet and holds the receiver away from his
ear and avoids touching the walls of the booth with his jacket.
"Grundle, Incorporated."
"Spokes?"
"Grundle, Incorporated," Spokes repeats.
"Oh, yeah, shit... this is, what, Williams and Son? Regarding
the advertisement in this weekend's... fuck -- "
"Close enough, GeeBee. What's sprinklin?"
"It's negligible. You got the phone tonight, Spokes?"
"Indeed I do, for another hour."
"Seen Nine Ways tonight?"
"He's to my immediate and direct left-most, not more than three
to four feet away from my very own self."
"Oh, oh," he says, and speaks more softly, as if Nine had
appeared outside the very phone booth, and not merely allegedly
at the other end of the phone, in third person: "Is he smoked
about last night?"
"Nah, no." Then away from the phone, but louder, and he can hear
the sound of music and bodies mix-filtering into the voice:
"Hey, Nine, you smoked about Ghettoboy skipping his ass out on
you last night?"
He winces.
"Nah, man, he ain't smoked. Things is sparkles. So, GeeBee, you
making an appearance tonight or is this your sick-leave call?"
"No, it's... well, where you guys at?"
"Libido." Then Spokes screams, not into the phone, but utterly
out of context to Ghettoboy's ear: "Samantha! Suck my cock!"
He forgets and slumps back against the pane of the booth-wall,
curses, and peels himself off with a sickly sticking velcro
sound. He looks dully at the amorphous pink smear which he knows
is the front entrance to the libido; obscured by layers of
chewing gum, expectorate, cola, back-alley breeze-dust.
"What'sat?" screams Spokes.
"Nothing."
"Gonna show, then, huh? Samantha! No! Fuck you!"
"Don't think so, Spokes. It's a, well..."
A bus floats by on winter wheels, reflecting the steel sky in
its windshield; revolving destination glow-letters slinking by
in green and blue.
"Bitch! Okay! Tonight!"
"Thing is, it's not a definite, understand, but there might be
this girl I'm checking in on."
"No shit?" Spokes asks, disinterested. "Feed her some for me."
"Sure. Say greets to Nine."
"All the way, catch you later, right-O, Gee. Saman -- "
He extricates himself from the choking humidity of the booth,
looks at his shoes and lights a cigarette. Steps back inside and
dials another number from another piece of paper with less folds
and cleaner writing, but no one is home at that number, or at
least they're not answering.
He doesn't like walking but he does it now, maybe because it's
at least something more than sitting around, waiting for the big
nothing to happen, which never does, anyway. The city lies low
here, sprawled and squalid, busted and torn, cracked, spiraled
and grated and chain-linked to the nuts.
He avoids eye-contact with the squatters. Shuffles his feet
across the pavement, crossing paths with wind-scattered paper
refuse and cigarette butts.
Red street lights and open sewer grates and brick and steel
suffused with lugubrious graffiti.
Streets of home.
Sky dense with rain smog and the reflection-glow of
down-downtown.
Smells like old water and clean paper smoke.
The el rattle-shoots by, three blocks away, in a shower of
turquoise sparks.
He walks.
He's not going to call for at least three days, if at all, and
that's a fact. Right, so, and even anyways, it's not like this
is a _big thing,_ this was barely-if-that a one night thing and
it didn't equal up to even that, so let it pass, relegate it to
the place where lovely things are allowed to be forgotten.
Or so she tells herself.
And instead of letting it bother her she gets dressed, clean
clothes, clean skin: the black panties and bra (the one with the
thin lace periphery), the leather-denim shortskirt (she decides
to go bare-legged), the high-heels (the comfortable ones)
because they're the easiest to get into, and the white shirt
(button-up) that she bought last month and has only (so far)
worn twice for (that asshole) Wilson. But enough of that --
that's now officially a gone thing, she's absolutely out, and
_so what_ if he paid for the blouse? He has nothing over her
anymore and she's told him so. And so she plays her
mirror-reflected fingers across the brittle mirror-collar of the
shirt and sighs, purses her lips, and decides to go without
makeup, because it feels like one of those nights (she doesn't
look that bad at all).
And so she goes to make some money. (Instead of sitting around
this place and thinking about these things that are almost
forgotten.)
3.
----
He climbs some fence and scrapes his hands on the way up, loses
his balance and scrapes his knees on the way down. He curses
loudly, voice rolling out like water through the streets, and if
anyone's around they're all staring at him, but he doesn't care.
He's in Two-Toe Town. Knows this place in night or day, like he
knows how to find and place his own feet; it's the watery
graveyard that feeds his dreams.
Uses that carbon-copy flash-of-light-and-close-your-eyes
knowledge of the environment to spit his form stealthily through
the heated knot of streetways. On a mission, with a destination,
he reaches Toby's in mere minutes, trying not to let himself
feel nostalgic about the surroundings.
He knocks loudly on the front door, (it's a house, just like
they used to put on TV, only much scaled-down) feeling suddenly
vulnerable here, four feet off street level and saturated in the
pearly glow of Toby's front light, which hangs by half a screw
over the door and attracts a steady nucleus of moths and
mosquitos and others less recognizable.
He waits an eternity and starts to think Toby's not around --
but he can see the blue flicker of the television through the
window to his left, so maybe he's just stoned out in the bathtub
again -- but then this voice comes out of the obdurate gloom and
scares the shit out of him until he realizes that it's Toby
himself:
"Hey, fuck you, Ghettoboy, I don't use that door anymore. Come
around back."
He jumps from the step and lands in soft mud. "Good to see you
too, Toby."
As his eyes adjust to the darkness a hand drops onto his
shoulder. Toby's voice close and warm and redolent of peach
brandy: "No shit, thanks for coming by. Where've you been?"
"The usual. Keeping busy."
Toby's glassy eyes smile. "Yeah."
And the warm emerald lambency of Toby's super-humble domicile
inhale them away from the smells and sounds of ultra-suburban
nighttime.
Toby is a non-practicing post-industrialist agnostic Christian;
gothic heroin-spiking shotgun faggot. Or he is none of these and
only claims it to be via arched eyebrows and shared needles and
mutations of fashion. Ghettoboy feels, at best, ambivalent about
most of the substrata that Toby traverses, but he has known him
since the age of zero-minus-one and so most of the usual rules
don't apply. It also makes him more comfortable to know that
none of the people he knows know Toby.
Toby whips them inside, closing the door behind them in a twitch
of the wrist. He twists his neck and makes it pop. He floats
across pinkgreen linoleum and plucks them pink lemonade Pepsis
from the fridge. They sit down immediately, Toby's house warm
and solid and humid with its dull brown walls and thinning cream
carpets; Toby in his usual chair which faces directly the
scattered, half de-scrambled, muted television screen, Ghettoboy
on the scuffed sleepover couch. With the crack of aluminum they
suck at their Pepsis. Toby scratches himself and smiles.
There is a ritual they share, traveling with them from the past,
birthed from puerile boredom and the humorless necessity of
experimentation, but carried with them out of reverence for the
what-once-was. And it begins tonight as Toby says:
"You want to start it? I've got some powerful blue-grade lopers
in the fridge we could use."
"No. Tonight I think we should go without."
"Clean?"
"Clean."
Empty.
Raw.
Vital.
Young.
Eric is thirteen, has been for three months, but Toby is two
years older, and sometimes as much as three. It's hard to tell,
though. He looks young. He acts old.
They bike hard-fast and splice through traffic, Toby in the
lead, Eric a few feet behind, but sometimes taking the
initiative and pedalling up ahead and wheeling a turn of his own
choosing. Someone honks a horn and Toby screams "Fuck you, cock
suck!" at the top of his lungs and they have a good laugh about
that later, in the safety of Eric's mother's kitchen, chewing
freeze-pops as a mitigation to the ozone-slick television summer
sun they've just come in from.
They come here often on weekday afternoons, especially Friday
(today's a Friday), because Toby (Eric, too) can't stand being
in school on a crippling Friday afternoon, by virtue of its
proximity to Saturday. Eric's mom works. Downtown business, Toby
figures, because of the money she ostensibly makes. Eric's dad
is never mentioned, never thought of. Dead or gone, jailed or
divorced, what's the difference? The apartment is theirs.
Toby plugs the tape into the VCR and Eric pulls the popcorn from
the microwave. They sit down on the carpet with their backs to
the sofa and watch the credits come up, accompanied by some
weird music. Eric leaps to his feet, spilling the popcorn, and
cranks on the Dolby.
Toby says that he's seen one of these at one of his sister's
parties, once. A year or so ago. Eric says that he's never seen
one, but of course Toby must know this.
The moving flesh appears on the screen right away. A tremor
passes through Eric's body, a feeling that he's unable to
understand. Illicit behavior on his part evoking fear and
excitement. Toby watches, head tilted, seemingly insouciant.
They turn it off after half an hour and three scenes. Agreeing
that the part with the two girls together was both stupid and
gross. Imagine, Toby says, next thing they'll do is put two guys
together. Gross, Eric agrees.
You get a boner? Toby asks. Eric shakes his head. Hey, Toby
assures, you can tell me. I got one.
Just now?
Yeah, says Toby. Wanna see?
No, I believe you.
So, did you?
Yeah. So?
No you didn't. Let me see.
No. Why?
Dunno. You ever get them in school? Like looking at girls?
Nah. Sometimes at night.
Yeah, me neither. Hey, you wanna play a game?
"Changed my mind. Let's do the lopers."
Toby spreads the tablets, cartridges, and bottles out on the
coffee table amid the already-present clutter of gay porn mags,
loose tobacco, videodiscs, miscellaneous jewelry and desiccated
junk food. "I'm myself gonna take a double hit of spark with a
chaser lob of this smack gunk. Lopers here for the G-Boy, nice
stuff. I like this nasal spray myself, goes straight away. God,
I'm horny. Here," Toby passes him a small taped-up Advil bottle.
Ghettoboy slams the bottle up his nose and bends over, head
between his knees, and squeezes. Inhales hard, moves to the next
nostril. Dizziness; breathe; white, soft white, and he's soaking
the world in through the pores of his skin; global sun...
Toby pops in the disc and turns the volume up just right, to the
level that their minds can alternately soak it up or filter it
out. The flesh appears suddenly in all its fifty-two inch glory,
and Ghettoboy watches, enraptured, however fleetingly.
She licks his dirty ear in the dark, the smell of urine coming
from around the corner or off the trick himself, runs her
fingers through his hair, and that's a trick in itself, with his
hair greasy and knotted.
He speaks cock-talk, dirty mouth, bitch this, cunt whore that.
She moans like she wants it. Tries not to cry when he jabs a
thumb into her without warning.
He takes her bent over boxes and metal, biting her lip.
Later, she straightens herself out a little in a diner washroom.
The waitress who eyed her acrimoniously when she came in is
knocking on the stall door. She walks past her without meeting
her eye and is back on the street feeling at least nominally
better.
Bad trick, but the fifty bucks sits comfortably in her purse,
warm and true, unchanging.
"And what's her name?"
"Who, this girl?"
"Yeah, what's her name?"
The girl the girl the girl. "I don't think you'd know her."
"Yeah, so what?"
"I don't know her name."
"You don't know her name?"
"Wait, yeah, she gave it to me. Hold on."
Fumble fingers switchblade to his pocket and grasp his wallet.
He slips paper through leather and focuses carefully on the ink
scrawl. The girl. Her number. She wasn't home.
"Her name is Dos."
"Ha! Her parents must be chippies. That's good. I like that."
"I don't think she has parents. A mother, maybe, but I think she
works."
Silence, then. Mutual silence filled by spaces. Spaces filled by
swirling voids of illusion and shortness of breath. The brown
walls shudder. Ghettoboy licks his lips. "She's real cute," he
says.
"You sound like a fucking pip."
"You should talk. Faggot."
Toby doesn't so much as shrug this off. Instead gives Ghettoboy
a bland look of heard-it-too-many-times. "What's her name
again?"
"Dos."
"Yeah?"
"Why?"
"I think I _do_ know her. You met her through Wilson, right?"
"What? What do you mean?"
"I mean, you met her through Wilson, right? You met her
_through_ Wilson? He, like, introduced you two?"
"What's that supposed to mean? What does fucking Nine Ways have
to do with anything?"
"I thought... never mind."
"What?"
"Never mind. I thought she serviced Nine Ways a time back. Wrong
person. Wrong name, I guess. Never mind."
"Like his girlfriend?"
"Like that, but not like that. You know."
"Fucking Nine Ways Wilson. What a load of shit."
"Sorry, hey. Maybe I'm wrong."
"Maybe?" He gets up.
"Hey, listen..."
"Look, I'm gonna go now. Thanks for..."
"Yeah."
"So see you later."
" 'Kay. See you later."
"Maybe I'll call that girl, see what she's up to."
"Sounds good. You go."
He goes.
Bleeding. Fucking bleeding. _Bleeding._
Walks fast, loose spikes of adrenaline and pain shooting up her
legs as she pounds the street.
Her rhythm is lost, her night is lost, whatever she had hoped
for this to be is gone, miles behind, faded into the mysterious
land of bullshit stories and almost-was. Bad tricks, two in a
row, and she's never been this poor on judging them, and what's
_happening_ to her?
She kicks at a stray cat as it hesitantly curls toward her
ankles; kicks it hard, catching it square in the head. It
screams and is gone, defense mechanisms ringing past code red as
it fires itself into the safety of darkness and refuse. All she
can think is: Is this all it is? Is it everything trying to take
a piece of me, and nothing more, when all I want is to roll up
and simply die?
Her nerves attack her body; her brain retaliates, discharging
random senselessness into every limb; limbs retaliate, telling
her that it's so absolutely the pain that's important, so pay
attention; mind wants to shut it out, shut it up, but it
ricochets; the tears seem to help, as it's momentarily something
to concentrate on; but then it begins again with heightened
urgency.
She walks, walks home. The night's over, she's a wreck, and the
world's a joke at the bottom of a hole in the middle of a raging
ball of meaninglessness.
4.
----
He goes to the first phone booth he sees, exactly and precisely
to call her, just so it will feel right, so that what he has
said will be accurate and thusly fulfilled. He'd planned it all
along. But, when she answers on the fifth ring...
"Hi, it's me."
"Who?"
...maybe it begins to seem to be the wrong time to do anything
of the sort.
"Ghettoboy. We... I was at your..."
Three days, he thinks. Standard. Should have waited.
"Hi," she says. She _says_ it like she _means_ it, if the word
can mean anything more than what it does.
He feels better. He asks her to breakfast.
"Do you have a car?" she asks. She's disappointed but
determined, it would seem, when he says no. "It'll have to be
the bus."
"What will? Where are we going?"
There is a long silence from her. The street beyond the booth
glass comes suddenly alive: blackened water and rust and metal
and street and the deep-night sound of the respiration of the
meticulously hidden people of the city.
Her voice is sad when she asks, "Have you ever been to the
country?"
It is four o'clock and some sixteen hours since sleep as the
horizon gives birth to tenuous promise of light. Sky turns a
lighter black. City recedes; amazing, cold, encompassing. He
turns and watches from where they have come, then where they
are, then where they are going -- or is there a distinction? He
has, of course, not been to the country before.
They sit at the back of the emptiness of the bus, this bus which
has cost them the price of nine or ten normal fares. But then
again it's not local transit: it's long distance, it's
cross-country, it's spanning the negative expanses, it's where
have you been and where are you going and why -- and is there a
difference?
The first town and unscheduled stop is called Opal. They get
off, hardly having even begun, and Ghettoboy thinks as he
watches the bus spin up dust and stone that the driver might as
well return to the city, as they were the only two passengers.
But then maybe he has a real destination -- another city,
somewhere far away, where the people live and breathe and work
and pay for bus tickets to get the hell out of there.
Like anywhere, he supposes. Where you came like where you're
going. Anywhere is everywhere. Just with different street names.
The sky is coming alive and the morning breeze -- real
road-and-horizon morning breeze -- catches their nostrils with
teasings of ditch-cut weed, dirt, and crops they can't identify.
Atop the warm and soft flows the lacquer of nascent metropolis,
just riding in off the wind, sending out its concentric vibes
and consternations.
"God," she breathes, "it's so beautiful out here."
"Yeah," he says, although he disagrees, because all it is is
long, and sad, and soft and dark, and monotone and mild, boring,
boring, quiet and wet, black and white, sky and land, one and
the same, the same, the same.
The bus-stop cafe they find themselves deposited in front of is
called, of course, The Road & Horizon. Maybe, she thinks, with a
flicker of a thought-smile, that when they named it they could
see the intrinsic beauty of the simple: parallel lines,
stretching to forever, all that you need, all that we have;
enough. Maybe, he thinks, they named it at a loss, realizing at
last that there was nothing but these two, the road and the edge
of the land, and nothing they could call this dive would change
that fact, so why bother, because if you're here you're here,
where else are you going to go, and it doesn't get any worse so
accept it.
She grabs his hand (here's a thrill, he thinks, and for a spark
of a white-hot ineffable moment, with the warmth of her perfect
soft hand touching his, maybe all this shit has been worth it,
maybe he hasn't been acting crazy, maybe this moment is what it
has all been for, right?) (and what am I doing, she thinks,
maybe five-eighths on her way to feeling giddy and yet all the
time growing bold, because it's _okay,_ this guy is okay, so
much not like the others) and pulls him inside the Road &
Horizon, Open 24 Hrs. don't you know.
Grimy fluorescent lights, red-black checkered floors and counter
tile and tablecloths, dirt streaks trailed from the door to the
unisex bathroom near the back, a wide and multi-scraped freezer
pushing obtrusively into the dining space, such as it is, and a
counter barring access to the kitchen, behind which stands an
old woman in a dead green apron and in front of which sits an
old man who chews on the edge of his coffee cup and swings his
heavy head around to look at the newcomers, his eyes alight with
distance and depth, or an effortless impression thereof.
Then turns away, indifferent.
Dos smiles at Ghettoboy. Grips his hand, and then, suddenly
cognizant of this action, lets go. "Isn't this place..." she
says, searching for the words.
"Ugly as fuck?" whispers Ghettoboy.
Her smile falls and she just shrugs.
"Help you kids?" asks the waitress, shifting her weight behind
the counter.
"From the city," says the old man to the woman, his voice like
sneakers skimming pavement.
"Yeah?" asks the woman, in their direction, unimpressed.
"Well, yeah, we are," says Dos, and points out the window at the
expanding thread of orange sunrise, "from the city."
"Yeah?" says the woman, with no tone of voice at all. "Get you
both something?"
"Yeah," says Dos, and draws nearer. Eyes scanning for a
phosphorescent menu of some sort, a high and wide emblazoned
Pepsi sign inundated with listings of hamburgers, milkshakes,
pies and their prices. Finding nothing but crumbling holes in
the walls, she hesitates. Finally, she asks for a bowl of ice
cream. "With chocolate sauce or something on it," she adds.
The woman raises an eyebrow and swings her gaze toward
Ghettoboy. "Anything else?"
"Just a..." -- he looks at the walls and then at the counter and
then at his own hands -- "Just a coffee."
"Black?"
"Two sugar one cream."
Without grace or sound, the woman disappears into the kitchen,
with only the swinging Employees Only door marking her wake.
Dos takes the humming white silence as her cue and leads
Ghettoboy over to a small table near the front, between the
window and the freezer. She sits, hands curled around each other
awkwardly, and she stares out the windows, eyes locked on the
intangible terminus.
He follows her gaze momentarily, but his eyes pull him back. He
watches her. Watches her watching. Her eyes, her light brown
hair in ethereal tangles, freckles, skin, neck lips teeth. She
turns to him and smiles, and he fights with himself not to look
away.
"I have to go the bathroom," he says, and stands up.
"Not as fucking cool as you thought you were," he says aloud to
himself as he dribbles into the toilet bowl. "She's nothing and
yet you're fucking everything up. Too smooth."
His piss is the color of the water. He rotates his head in a
slow arc, back and around, his eyes closed, his neck muscles
spasming. He finishes, shakes it with two fingers and looks at
it. "Behave," he says.
He flushes. Pulls up his pants and reads the graffiti. Fags suck
cock. Franky's mom has big boobs. O.R.P. was here. There once
was a girl named McDuckett...
He jiggles the handle on the toilet but the water keeps
swirling, spiraling, flushing. He backs out of the stall, eyes
himself warily in the plexus of soap-scum mirror, then washes
his hands only to find a defective dryer and no paper towels. He
shakes them off then runs them through his hair.
"You're the king," he says to his obscured reflection, and
clicks a finger-gun at his gut with a smile.
He returns to the table as she's spooning ice cream into her
mouth, and she looks up with her head tilted over the bowl and
smiles self-consciously. He smiles back.
He sits down, stirs and sips his coffee, which tastes about two
sugars and one cream short of perfection. He stirs it again,
with flagrant concentration, trying to maybe dredge up something
lost beneath the black viscosity. He steals a look at her. She
licks her spoon and smiles.
She leaves a tip despite his objections ("No one leaves tips in
these places," and "She probably gets paid more than they do in
the city, anyway.") and they pay at the front. Connie, as her
name tag reads, punches up their bill on a pocket calculator and
then asks for the five seventy-five. The guy sitting at the
counter grunts and taps his mug against the sugar canister in
non-rhythmic sequences. Ghettoboy pays with a ten, disgusted
that Dos' tip alone would have covered the bill, but he might as
well forget that and play it gallant, as he would have insisted
on paying for her ice cream anyway. He thinks he probably would
have, anyway.
"You kids have a good trip," says Connie, but her eyes are cold
and silent. Like she knows no one would actually be coming here,
small-town speck-on-the-highway Opal, to stay, thinks Ghettoboy.
Dos takes it at face value and thanks her. They drift together,
side by side, across sullied checker linoleum and into the
outside once again.
They stand beyond the in-swing of the door, breathing deeply the
graveled parking-lot edge-of-the-universe morning air. She
reaches blindly and holds his hand.
"The earth," she whispers.
Morning.
They walk into the field and the dust and the breaking light
through the weeds and stalks. They walk until they are walking a
ghost, knees weak and eyes skyward, warm fingers entwined, and
then they drop-fall into the dryness of soil, hot and together,
one and one and _one_ with the earth.
His lips on her lips and hers on his and all this and more as
the sun tears free of the horizon with a sudden warm and
appreciative hello to their naked flesh.
She lies and listens to the fluctuations and imperfections of
his voice as he speaks to her through the medium of soft country
air and recovering depth of forlorn soul. Sun wavers and filters
unhindered, finally, into her eyes, and she turns over onto her
stomach, with her face nestled between his chest and arm. And
the smell there, the scent so strongly of him, eases and teases
and fondles her sadness. As he speaks.
"And the kid, you know, he wasn't even in Picky's group. But I
hated that kid. Had some brain complex, brain defect,
congenital, I don't know. It's not fair, you know, not really,
to hate a kid like that, or at least you feel bad about it,
anyway."
He's a little like that guy from the east side of last year, she
thinks. Purple hair and razored eyebrows. His name was Aaron,
maybe, or Eric. His hands were soft like this, and his chin hair
was longer, and his voice was deeper, and his arms were
stronger, and he was an asshole, and of course that's maybe why
she was in love with him. Is this what's happening here? Can't
be.
"It's like the same kind of thing that makes you feel bad about
punching a girl. Not that I do, you know, but there was this one
chick, I mean she was a fucking ninja, I guess, and was racing
me around with these finger daggers, shit, I don't know. Like I
stole her boyfriend or brother's dope, she was screaming. And
what do you do when they're going to kill you, and you can tell?
You fight back. But you don't feel good about it."
This utterly foreign landscape, both the sky and the peace and
calm of the smell of his armpit and the soft blue fog of
serenity that's building up at the back of her mind. These are
the things that scare her and should not. Get too comfortable
and the bridge always breaks, doesn't it? Every time, she knows.
Every time it's the same, and nothing is learned. Hope precedes
and overrides precaution in some sickeningly cellular way. And
here it all comes rushing back. This fucker. He makes her so
comfortable.
"And I don't know why that should matter. Because they're
weaker, I guess, and can't normally on a good day be as lethal
as should be necessary on a bad one. Or because you're attracted
to them? Respect or fear them -- love them. I guess it's all the
same ball of wax. Scary. Because I don't even want any of that.
Nothing should come to that. That belated entrapment of the
soul, you know, screaming to break free. That relationship
thing. I don't think I want that. Could hack that."
But caution flees from her grasp each time, and yet she'll
resolve it, she'll break free of these internal strings that
stretch her beyond her limit. Caution in the wind, isn't it
always? Caught up in the stars and the sun somewhere there,
drifting down at inopportune moments to catch in the sunlight
like motes of dust and grab our attention. Peripheral vision,
hindsight; ignore these. Feel the correctness of this absolute
vision. This feeling of peace is not as wrong as she'd like to
believe.
"Because I'm just myself, and how do I portray that to a
completely other individual?"
It could just be all right. Because things get better.
"And I don't need to know the difficulty of that portrayal. I
don't need that, and let me be hollow and shallow, it doesn't
matter. I'm not a fucking TV movie star. I got to take it how I
take it."
"You do," she says. "Things get better."
His hand brushes down her neck. "You're right."
And so she talks, not so much to fill the elaborate spaces, but
because she can, and because this situation -- her hand
alternately grasping his shoulder, his belt, or his hand, as
they walk together, slow and straight and free, and he bitches
about the dirt that's in his pants and in his hair, and he's not
really listening to her at all, it seems -- this situation
soothes and calms her and fills her with the conviction that all
is all right with anything she might possibly have to say.
"You can take any one singular thing of pure oneness and self,
anything that is what it is without confusion or debate, and
when you remove it from its intricate context, it suddenly
becomes more than it could when it was relying on its
environment. Whether it's a phrase or a word or a person or a
symbol, without context or past or predetermination it suddenly
becomes a beautiful thing, and we can see it for what it didn't
have without everything you tried to give it, and we understand
the aesthetics we've been hiding from it."
"I think I got dirt in my nostrils, for shit sake."
"Yeah? Me too. Like I was saying. Like a song. Like song titles.
You pick up a disc and look at song titles. And the titles are
something like 'Orange,' or 'I'm a Fool,' or 'Touch,' and
suddenly you intuitively know that there's so much more to those
simple words, and aren't they beautiful? Just all by themselves.
It's all they need."
"Yeah," he says as he buckles his belt with two dedicated hands.
They sit by the edge of the road. Silent and secure, with only
the wind blowing between them.
This nature, this world, she thinks. The glistening green glow
of the sky in all its premature, predatory glory. This world and
this silence swallows us all. And if we're lucky enough we find
the time to sit by the edge of the road and watch it; watch
ourselves as we fall beneath the horizon, a sparkling simulacrum
of what we could have been -- now forgotten. Forever. And if
we're luckier than we have any right to be, we catch ourselves
before we're gone, and find bodies to keep warm with, and minds
to meld with, and together, two separate entities feigning as
one, we take comfort in the minute stigmata of ourselves.
She's so beautiful, he thinks. Something bothers him. Bothers
him because she's not like he might have expected, and he
doesn't know how to handle this newness. She's wonderful, as she
holds him, but can he hold her?
It's too much; he hasn't the strength. He lets his brain rake
trenches past his heart, patterned as shivers down his spine,
until it's too much. It hurts.
It's enough to know that she's here now and there's no reason to
believe he'll do anything to disrupt that. He couldn't if he
wanted to.
She points to the waning points of light in the purpling sky,
stars about to wink out for the duration of another overheated
day. He just nods and smiles as the breeze catches the dust in
his hair.
5.
----
Back in the city already, with its gloom and gauntness, looming
structures of stained sky, white-hot burning points of headlight
sunrise screaming past the dust, concrete, and french-fry
grease. So soon, almost as if nothing has changed, he thinks.
Silently sad, really, the way that it is already sinking
somewhere away from immediate consciousness and into the
obdurate blueness that constitutes memory. Like it never
happened.
But it happened, she thinks, and she smiles as she incorporates
this into her envisioned reality by giving him a quick-soft kiss
on the corner of his mouth. Fulfillment and this alien sense of
calm kicking and clawing its way into her capillaries. She won't
let it, though, she resolves as she fights back a smile.
He picks up her hand and brushes his thumb lightly across her
palm. She takes sudden comfort in his poorly concealed
confusion.
"Hey, it was nice," she says.
He looks into her eyes and feels a disquieted bubbling in his
stomach. Telltales of a hunger, he thinks.
"I'll call you later, and maybe we can go out and do something,"
he says.
"I think I'll sleep in late," she simpers, "but yes, give me a
call."
"Okay."
She turns around and walks in the direction of her mother's
empty apartment. He watches her for half a second and then turns
and walks away from her. Neither turns to look back. Not looking
back.
He beats the so-common path all the way back to home of all
homes and hole of all shit-holes at residence 909 Forget Street,
Basement Suite B. The sky burns as he sinks below street level,
but the city sleeps. The day which is night is over, and the
negative space which is day has come. Sleep, because we're all
nocturnal seekers of fortune and entertainment, and when the
scores of pale-faced business doers purr to life in their
rusting pavement-licking spaceships, it's time to forget today
and move resolutely past the dream transition of
never-quite-tomorrow.
His head hurts.
He can't sleep and so cranks local radio stations, one after the
next, settling on the pirate euro feeds. He fires up his
notebook and scans random sites, settling eventually on the
infinite listings of names and actions: Kathy Ireland, Belle
Gracetown, anal, oral, trad, lez, celeb, Ambrosia, Madonna,
kink. He tilts flat Sprite from a two-liter down his throat as
he advances and retreats past multi-tiered layers of pics,
movies, and softs with the click of a fingernail.
She chews on week-gone fried chicken leftovers from the fridge,
still good as ever. She washes it down with tap water from her
filtration canister. She shakes salt onto her plate and finishes
a drumstick.
The purple glow of neon morning percolates in through the
interstices of curtains as she methodically turns out all the
lights, steps out of her shoes, peels off her clothes, and
power-collapses onto the couch.
She's not tired, and so watches the walls as her eyes grow
accustomed to the mutating light.
She sucks on sleeping pills from the bathroom cabinet.
Time-lapse oblivion takes three-quarters of forever and ever to
greet her aching eyelids.
And when she breathes the first wisps of awake, it's all heavy
and thick with thought and heated like a dry mouth after a day
of walking the simmering pavement, and the only thoughts that
infiltrate her disorientation are: Was she working? Does she
need to be working soon? Who's missing her? Is she late? Is he
going to be pissed off again? Is --
And then she's awake, all awake, and consciousness dawns and
short-term dissipates. The dreams fade like hunger once fed,
forgotten and weak with no leverage left to cause her pain.
She smiles at the full-day suffusion of sunlight that streams
importunately in through the windows despite the curtains and
other objects in its way: stereo cabinet, empty; television
antenna, abandoned; speaker cables hanging from the ceiling,
severed, derelict.
"This place looks like it's been robbed," she laughs, as if for
the first time.
She barefoots it into the bathroom and swallows four extra
strength Alleves. The unfiltered softwater burns her throat. She
coughs and smiles at her myriad reflections.
"Morning," she giggles.
A grimy thumb, not his own, peels open his eyelids, one after
the other. It takes a minute for this newly available visual
dimension to be properly processed as valid sensory input, and
then another minute for his brain to know what to do with it.
Finally, his skull screams: you're awake.
Pitsy, the girl from Basement Suite A, has broken in again --
although maybe not accurately "broken in," as he gave her a key
after the third incident to curb any further damage to his lock
bolt -- and is methodically redistributing her weight as she
stares plaintively down at him.
"Hey, wake up," she pleads in a broken voice.
"Fuck off, Pitsy. What are you doing here?"
Throaty giggle. "Fuck off _Pitsy_? Shit, Ghetto, the sun is
going down already, what are you doing sleeping still?"
He moans. Does he need this now? "I was up late. Early.
Whatever. I'm tired."
"Are you getting up, though, or what?"
"What do you _want_?"
"Aww," she whines, and collapses next to him on the futon. She
brushes her fingers across his forehead and frowns as he cringes
away from her. "You got some good stuff for me?"
"No, I got nothing for you."
"Got some stuff at all, like maybe you're selling, laying around
here? I can't pay you for it now, but..."
He looks at her. Limp, unwashed blond hair framing her
junkie-bitch pallor. Her breath is curdled Listerine trying to
mask macaroni, tobacco, maybe semen. Emaciated, disgusting.
"What's happening to you?"
She laughs. "You know. You know. Happened to you for awhile last
year, remember, and I had to lend _you_ the money? It's okay, I
can handle it, I just need something to get me going for today
and maybe the rest of the week, but it's okay because I'm
totally on top of this shit. Remember what you used to say? 'The
shit is not better than me'? Hey," she says, pushing a hand
abruptly into his underwear, "can I get you off?"
"No," he says, too emphatically, grabbing her wrist. "No," he
sighs.
"Come on," she implores, her voice worse and worse, sad and
sore, red and blue, raw. "Come on, Ghetto, like old times, like
we used to, then you can get me some of the good shit, huh?"
He extracts himself delicately from her grip and stands up next
to the futon. Stares at her for a moment and then backs up into
the kitchen nook. "It's not like that anymore," he says as he
pours himself some artificially sweetened orange juice. He
stands and looks at the glass in his hand. "I've got a girl
now."
Her laughter behind him. She coughs. "You don't got girls. Girls
get you. You screw it up. You screwed _me_ up. It won't last.
You can't last. Now come on." Her voice breaks. "I need some
stuff." She cries softly as she crosses the floor and touches
his neck. "I need some stuff and I don't care how I have to get
it."
She stinks.
Anger. "Why do you keep coming here?"
"You can help me. Come on. Let's do it. Don't you want me?"
Revulsion. "No. I don't."
"You do. You need me."
He turns and pushes her. Pushes her with a force he never knew
he had. And if he had known, would never have used. She flies
across his floor and falls over the edge of his armchair. She
hits the floor, hard, the air knocked out of her lungs before
she can even be scared, and then he's on top of her.
"This means you'll get me the stuff?"
He backhands her across the face.
She cries. No tears. Not unhappy.
It's seven twenty-nine when he calls, even though she has
decided that he's not going to call -- it's too soon. Even
though she has decided he is not going to call she has further
decided she's not going to work tonight, and maybe more than
likely not tomorrow night, and possibly extremely likely never
again. Something within her is glowing soft and warm and as she
senses this glow she knows she's better than the job and doesn't
need it like she maybe used to, although she's pretty sure she
never needed it and it was just other people who needed her who
convinced her that it was the other way around.
She's at home when he calls because right now she doesn't know
where else to be, and even though she's sure that it's not him
calling she gets a funny sparkling feeling at the back of her
throat when she picks it up.
"Hi, it's me."
"Hi," she says.
"How are you?" Polished; aloof.
"I'm fine." Cool; smooth.
Low-voltage silence hum, and then: "Listen, do you want to go
out and do something with me? Now, or later? Tonight sometime?"
She smiles and sits down on the edge of the couch. "Yes. Now
would be good."
"I'll come pick you up."
This world is theirs, this night and its elaborate product
placement are speaking to them in the tongues which have been
created by their need; buy and sell, supply and demand,
youth-oriented aggressive advertising campaigns all culminating
in a synesthesia which transcends the media which comprises it
all. The night with its neon and carbon monoxide haze slakes
their flesh and pulls them deeper into the crevices of the city
streets. They know what is happening, understand -- or think
they do -- how each piece relates to each other and themselves,
and they accept and welcome this, as they are the ones who have
inadvertently shaped it.
Part of the machine, they hold hands, whisper loudly to defeat
the noise, hum key melodies which emanate from converted shop
fronts, dive in and out of hipster funk beat bars, sit and watch
the foot-flow, smell the smells, buy re-fried re-greased fast
foods, tread mute sidewalk, kiss.
Later, pulled away from the garish thoroughfare into a gray
corner, he whispers in her ear.
"Where do you want to go tonight?"
"I don't care," she breathes, her warmth mingling with his and
the rest. "Take me to the places you usually go."
And so it crumbles, all but imperceptibly, as they step
hand-linked inside the heated metallic glow of the sweatshop
that is the Hybrid Harbor. Clubnoise and clublights and clublove
and clubstench. One in all, quintessential: loud, hot, fun. The
jive permeates their bones as they are instantaneously sopped up
by a greater force immeasurable: clubscene.
She smiles as he leads her, and she gesticulates toward the
upper levels, trying to relate a story about a girlfriend of
hers who had passed out on one of the metal railings many months
ago and had to be dragged down the stairs, unconscious, by three
bouncers, but he just smiles and nods and shakes his head and
points mutely at his ears. She gives up and resorts to the
gyration and slow methodical rocking of default club mode.
He pulls her through the crowd. Nine Ways is here tonight,
playing heroin commando and multi-charmed global contact
extraordinaire. He is at his table near the back of the bar,
surrounded by delegates, flunkies, tissue boys and potential
customers. He nods his head minutely as eight or nine voices vie
for his attention.
"There he is. He can get us some good -- "
"Nathan? You work for Nathan?"
They break through the periphery of sycophants and easy-comers,
and Nine Ways breaks abruptly out of his reverie with a
smile-nod and a lugubrious "Ghettoboy, how the fuck _are_ you?"
"Good good," he shouts. "Hey -- "
But Nine's interest wanders elsewhere and then he smiles
broadly. "Who the fuck is the lovely lady with you?" He laughs.
Ghettoboy turns and looks at a despondent Dos. She shakes her
head at him.
He turns around. "You know her?"
Nine laughs. "That's my _slut,_ man."
Ghettoboy looks at her. She looks at her feet.
He turns around. "She worked for you?"
"Right. Worked _hard._"
Ghettoboy shrugs.
"She followed me in here," he says.
Nine laughs. "You wanted something."
Ghettoboy sits down. "You know. Just wondering if there's any
business tonight. Anything for me?"
Nine smiles. "There's always business. Always. I told you."
Ghettoboy smiles.
When he turns around again she is gone.
Deep sky-reflected flash of night. Three a.m. if she had to
guess.
She wanders. Legs tired, feet sore.
They get in her way, loud and obnoxious as they are kicked out
of basement bars or dropped off by fed-up taxi drivers. Drunk
and happy. Business has climaxed. Down-slope.
Another night, a normal night, she'd give up on the regular loop
and call it endgame. Time to go home. Rest and count bills. Play
soft music and clean herself up. Sleep.
Not tonight. She wanders. Legs tired, feet sore.
He drops off the third package to a decrepit woman in a
wheelchair hiding behind a reinforced door. She allows him
inside after shakily removing lock bolt after chain bolt after
slip lock. As he hands her the package he looks around: maybe
ten by ten feet, with a dirty low-watt lamp in one corner, a
flattened cot against the opposite wall, a narrow doorway
leading to a squalid washroom. Needles and band-aid wrappers and
splinters of wood scattered about the threadbare carpet.
The woman snatches the package away from him and then, instead
of opening it, looks up at him pleadingly and says, "Music?"
"Yeah. Music. That's gonna be seventy-five."
She hands him a ziploc baggie with the appropriate bills. He
nods and exits.
False dawn mimics images against the smog overhead. The smell of
sewage and steel. Intimations of morning silence echo above the
street noise.
He stands at a corner, pretending to wait for each alternating
set of lights to change so that he can cross. Faces north, then
east, then north, then east.
Three blocks back the way he came he enters a phone booth. He
peels a small bill off soon-to-be-Nine's wad, and feeds it into
the reader. Four point five minutes local, flashes the display.
He picks up the receiver and it begins to count down as he dials
Toby's number.
"Ghetto?"
"Yeah, Toby, you busy?"
"Not really." Tech music in the background being gradiently
silenced. "What's up?"
"Nothing much, really. Just thought I'd call."
"No. Really, Ghetto. What the fuck's up?"
He closes his eyes until blood lightning flashes. "I just got a
question. A stupid question. I don't know. We can talk later if
you don't got time now."
"No. I got time."
"You ever really fuck something up? With a girl? I mean, with
another person? But like that?"
"No. But you did?"
"Yeah, tonight, sort of."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing, really. It doesn't matter.Just wondering."
"You liked her?"
"She's okay. But she doesn't... understand me. What I'm about."
"So you fucked it up."
"I didn't."
"No?"
"Sort of. Yes. I did. Fuck."
Silence. He hears a voice, not Toby's, in the background.
"Toby?"
"Yeah?"
"Why? Why did I do that?"
"You want my opinion?"
"Yes."
"My candid opinion? No bullshit?"
"Yes, no shit."
"You did that, probably, because deep down you fully realize
you're not nearly deserving of someone like that."
"Yeah?"
"Maybe. I think so."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Well, fuck you. Fuck you, Toby. Fuck you." He hangs up the
phone.
He sits down on the sidewalk outside a McDonald's. Watches
traffic slow down to watch him. He flips a coin, whispering
"tails" each time but never checking the result, until he misses
it, and it drops to the street and rolls into a rain grate.
Across the street and half a block away, in all its tacky
secular glory, burns a neon green cross. Some church, he
guesses. Some people, some lives, some beliefs.
She buys two double cheeseburgers at a Dairy Queen. She smiles
at the pockmarked boy who hands her the brown bag, even though
she told him she wanted it for inside. She sits down anyway,
near the window, away from the doors.
As she eats, she counts the number of stars that make up the
words "Super Value" on a poster that's pasted against one of the
inner windows.
She doesn't notice the man who enters until he is standing next
to her table.
"Do you remember me?"
She doesn't, of course, but she gets this question on occasion.
Knows what it means.
"Sure I do," she says.
"Are the prices the same?" he asks, halfway to embarrassed.
"The same," she sighs with mock exuberance.
"I got a motel room, half a block away. Are you busy?"
"No," she says, and stands, leaving behind half a cheeseburger,
and smiles at him as he leads her diffidently into the
fluorescent-powdered night air. He's one of the good ones.
Craig Boyko <meena.cc.uregina.ca>
-----------------------------------
Craig Boyko is a sometimes student at the University of Calgary
in Alberta. He's constantly being shushed by his next-door
neighbor. Other InterText stories written by Craig Boyko:
"Decisions" (v6n1), "Wave" (v6n2), and "Gone" (v6n6). He can be
found on the Web at <http://www.geocities.com/Paris/3308/top.html>.
FYI
=====
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